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Elizabeth 

and her German Garden 






/ 

I Elizabeth 

and her 


German Garden 


^ CK/VYy\JiXXL y 

New Edition with Additions 


Nehj gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.. Ltd. 

1900 

All rights reserved 


23 


Pz s 

•^ 9 / 5 ^ 

£ 

5“ 

COPYRIGHT, 1900, 


I Library of Cofirfre^s 

I Two Copies REt-Eivt:) 

j lUL 23 1900 

i entry 

|«o a 

I COPY. 

I 0. '-P'.Ttie 

* ORU.n I- \ iS,0N, 

AUG. 1 1900 


By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


^First Edition, September, 1898. Reprinted November, 1898: December, 
1898: March, May, and July, 1899 (twice); August and October, 1899 
(twice). 

New Edition with additions set up and electrotyped July, 1900. 


6 G 


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Nornvood Press 

y. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood^ Mass.y U.S.A. 











vO 




Elizabeth 

and her German Garden 









ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN 
GARDEN 


May ith. — I love my garden. I am writing 
in it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much 
interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation 
to look at all the glories of the new green leaves 
washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two 
owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a 
long conversation that I enjoy as much as any 
warbling of nightingales. The gentleman owl 


says 


_ and she answers from her tree 


little way off, beautifully assenting 


to and completing her lord’s remark, as becomes a 
properly constructed German she-owl. They say 
the same thing over and over again so emphati¬ 
cally that I think it must be something nasty 
about me; but I shall not let myself be fright¬ 
ened away by the sarcasm of owls. 

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No 
one has lived in the house, much less in the gar¬ 
den, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty 
old place that the people who might have lived 








2 


ELIZABETH AND 


here and did not, deliberately preferring the hor¬ 
rors of a flat in a town, must have belonged to 
that vast number of eyeless and earless persons 
of whom the world seems chiefly composed. 
Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty; 
but the greater part of my spring happiness is due 
to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves. 

I am always happy (out of doors be it under¬ 
stood, for indoors there are servants and furni¬ 
ture), but in quite different ways, and my spring 
happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or 
autumn happiness, though it is not more intense, 
and there were days last winter when I danced for 
sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite 
of my years and children. But I did it behind 
a bush, having a due regard for the decencies. 

There are so many bird-cherries round me, 
great trees with branches sweeping the grass, and 
they are so wreathed just now with white blos¬ 
soms and tenderest green that the garden looks 
like a wedding. I never saw such masses of 
them; they seemed to fill the place. Even 
across a little stream that bounds the garden on 
the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield 
beyond, there is an immense one, a picture of grace 
and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


3 


My garden is surrounded by cornfields and 
meadows, and beyond are great stretches of sandy 
heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave 
off the bare heath begins again ; but the forests 
are beautiful in their lofty, pink-stemmed vast¬ 
ness, far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green, 
and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, 
and everywhere the breathless silence; and the 
bare heaths are beautiful too, for one can see 
across them into eternity almost, and to go out 
on to them with one's face towards the setting 
sun is like going into the very presence of God. 

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird- 
cherries and greenery where I spend my happy 
days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray 
stone house with many gables where I pass my 
reluctant nights. The house is very old, and has 
been added to at various times. It was a convent 
before the Thirty Years' War, and the vaulted 
chapel, with its brick floor worn by pious peasant 
knees, is now used as a hall. Gustavus Adolphus 
and his Swedes passed through more than once, 
as is duly recorded in archives still preserved, for 
we are on what was then the high-road between 
Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The 
Lion of the North was no doubt an estimable 


4 


ELIZABETH AND 


person and acted wholly up to his convictions, 
but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, 
who were not without convictions of their own, 
sending them out on to the wide, empty plain 
to piteously seek some life to replace the life of 
silence here. 

From nearly all the windows of the house I can 
look out across the plain, with no obstacle in the 
shape of a hill, right away to a blue line of distant 
forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the 
setting sun — nothing but a green, rolling plain, 
with a sharp edge against the sunset. I love 
those west windows better than any others, and 
have chosen my bedroom on that side of the 
house so that even times of hair-brushing may 
not be entirely lost, and the young woman who 
attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil 
her duties about a mistress recumbent in an easy- 
chair before an open window, and not to profane 
with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This 
girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the 
garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a 
respectable German lady should lead have got 
into a sad muddle since she came to me. The 
people round about are persuaded that I am, to 
put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


5 


for the news has travelled that I spend the day 
out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye 
has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook 
when you can get some one to cook for you ? 
And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets 
better and quicker than I could, and all forms of 
needlework of the fancy order are inventions of 
the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying 
their heart to wisdom. 

We had been married five years before it struck 
us that we might as well make use of this place by 
coming down and living in it. Those five years 
were spent in a flat in a town, and during their 
whole interminable length I was perfectly miserable 
and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly 
notion that has at times disturbed me that my 
happiness here is less due to the garden than to a 
good digestion. And while we were wasting our 
lives there, here was this dear place with dandelions 
up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and 
completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with 
nobody but the north wind taking the least notice 
of it, and in May — in all those five lovely Mays 
— no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries 
and still more wonderful masses of lilacs, every¬ 
thing glowing and blowing, the Virginia creeper 


6 


ELIZABETH AND 


madder every year, until at last, in October, the 
very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the 
owls and the squirrels and all the blessed little 
birds reigning supreme, and not a living creature 
ever entering the empty house except the snakes, 
which got into the habit during those silent years 
of wriggling up the south wall into the rooms on 
that side whenever the old housekeeper opened 
the windows. All that was here, — peace, and 
happiness, and a reasonable life, — and yet it never 
struck me to come and live in it. Looking back 
I am astonished, and can in no way account for 
the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this 
far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven. 
Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even use 
the place in summer, that I submitted to weeks 
of seaside life with all its horrors every year ; 
until at last, in the early spring of last year, hav¬ 
ing come down for the opening of the village 
school, and wandering out afterwards into the 
bare and desolate garden, I don't know what 
smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back 
my childhood with a rush and all the happy days 
I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that 
day ? It was the beginning of my real life, 
my coming of age as it were, and entering into my 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


7 


kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and 
brown, quiet earth ; leafless and sad and lonely 
enough out there in the damp and silence, yet 
there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure 
delight in the first breath of spring that I used to 
as a child, and the five wasted years fell from me 
like a cloak, and the world was full of hope, and 
I vowed myself then and there to nature, and 
have been happy ever since. 

My other half being indulgent, and with some 
faint thought perhaps that it might be as well to 
look after the place, consented to live in it at any 
rate for a time ; whereupon followed six specially 
blissful weeks from the end of April into June, 
during which I was here alone, supposed to be 
superintending the painting and papering, but as 
a matter of fact only going into the house when 
the workmen had gone out of it. 

How happy I was ! I don’t remember any 
time quite so perfect since the days when I was 
too little to do lessons and was turned out with 
sugar on my eleven o’clock bread and butter on 
to a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and dai¬ 
sies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost 
its charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies 
even more passionately now than then, and never 


8 


ELIZABETH AND 


would endure to see them all mown away if I were 
not certain that in a day or two they would be 
pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as 
ever. During those six weeks I lived in a world 
of dandelions and delights. The dandelions car¬ 
peted the three lawns, — they used to be lawns, 
but have long since blossomed out into meadows 
filled with every sort of pretty weed, — and under 
and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches 
were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets, and 
celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular 
delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, 
so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though 
they too had had the painters at work on them. 
Then, when the anemones went, came a few stray 
periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the bird- 
cherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before 
I had a little got used to the joy of their flowers 
against the sky, came the lilacs — masses and 
masses of them, in clumps on the grass, with 
other shrubs and trees by the side of walks, and 
one great continuous bank of them half a mile 
long right past the west front of the house, away 
down as far as one could see, shining glorious 
against a background of firs. When that time 
came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


9 


blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, 
silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south 
windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, 
and thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot 
describe it. My days seemed to melt away in a 
dream of pink and purple peace. 

There were only the old housekeeper and her 
handmaiden in the house, so that on the plea of 
not giving too much trouble I could indulge what 
my other half calls my fantaisie dereglee as 
regards meals — that is to say, meals so simple 
that they could be brought out to the lilacs on 
a tray; and I lived, I remember, on salad and 
bread and tea the whole time, sometimes a very 
tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as the 
old lady thought, from starvation. Who but a 
woman could have stood salad for six weeks, even 
salad sanctified by the presence and scent of the 
most gorgeous lilac masses ? I did, and grew in 
grace every day, though I have never liked it 
since. H ow often now, oppressed by the neces¬ 
sity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, 
two of which are conducted by the functionaries 
held indispensable to a proper maintenance of 
the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded 
by joints of meat, how often do I think of my 


10 


ELIZABETH AND 


salad days, forty in number, and of the blessed¬ 
ness of being alone as I was then alone ! 

And then the evenings, when the workmen 
had all gone and the house was left to emptiness 
and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered 
up her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my 
little room in quite another part of the house 
had been set ready, how reluctantly I used to 
leave the friendly frogs and owls, and with my 
heart somewhere down in my shoes lock the door 
to the garden behind me, and pass through the 
long series of echoing south rooms full of shadows 
and ladders and ghostly pails of painters’ mess, 
and humming a tune to make myself believe I 
liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored 
hall, up the creaking stairs, down the long white¬ 
washed passage, and with a final rush of panic 
whisk into my room and double lock and bolt 
the door! 

There were no bells in the house, and I used 
to take a great dinner-bell to bed with me so that 
at least I might be able to make a noise if fright¬ 
ened in the night, though what good it would 
have been I don’t know, as there was no one to 
hear. The housemaid slept in another little cell 
opening out of mine, and we two were the only 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


II 


living creatures in the great empty west wing. 
She evidently did not believe in ghosts, for I 
could hear how she fell asleep immediately after 
getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, 

mats je les redoute^^ as a French lady said, who 
from her books appears to have been strong- 
minded. 

The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was 
never rung, but it comforted me to see it on the 
chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything 
but placid, it was all so strange, and there were 
such queer creakings and other noises. I used 
to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light 
sleep by the cracking of some board, and listen 
to the indifferent snores of the girl in the next 
room. In the morning, of course, I was as brave 
as a lion and much amused at the cold perspira¬ 
tions of the night before; but even the nights 
seem to me now to have been delightful, and 
myself like those historic boys who heard a voice 
in every wind and snatched a fearful joy. I 
would gladly shiver through them all over again 
for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house, 
empty of servants and upholstery. 

How pretty the bedrooms looked with noth¬ 
ing in them but their cheerful new papers! 


12 


ELIZABETH AND 


Sometimes I would go into those that were fin¬ 
ished and build all sorts of castles in the air about 
their future and their past. Would the nuns 
who had lived in them know their little white¬ 
washed cells again, all gay with delicate flower 
papers and clean white paint ? And how aston¬ 
ished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned 
into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to in¬ 
sure a cleanliness of body equal to their purity 
of soul! They would look upon it as a snare 
of the tempter; and I know that in my own case 
I only began to be shocked at the blackness of 
my nails the day that I began to lose the first 
whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fifteen 
with the parish organist, or rather with the 
glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and fiery 
moustache which was all I ever saw of him, and 
which I loved to distraction for at least six 
months ; at the end of which time, going out 
with my governess one day, I passed him in the 
street, and discovered that his unofficial garb was 
a frock-coat combined with a turn-down collar 
and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any 
more. 

The first part of that time of blessedness was 
the most perfect, for I had not a thought of any- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


13 


thin^ but the peace and-.beauty all round me. 
Then he appeared suddenly who has a right to 
appear when and how he will and rebuked me 
for never having written, and when I told him 
that I had been literally too happy to think of 
writing, he seemed to take it as a reflection on 
himself that I could be happy alone. I took 
him round the garden along the new paths I 
had had made, and showed him the acacia and 
lilac glories, and he said that it was the purest 
selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor 
the offspring were with me, and that the lilacs 
wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease 
him by offering him the whole of my salad and 
toast supper which stood ready at the foot of 
the little verandah steps when we came back, but 
nothing appeased that Man of Wrath, and he 
said he would go straight back to the neglected 
family. So he went; and the remainder of the 
precious time was disturbed by twinges of con¬ 
science (to which I am much subject) whenever 
I found myself wanting to jump for joy. I went 
to look at the painters every time my feet were 
for taking me to look at the garden; I trotted 
diligently up and down the passages; I criticised 
and suggested and commanded more in one day 


ELIZABETH AND 


14 

than I had done in all the rest of the time ; I 
wrote regularly and sent my love; but I could 
not manage to fret and yearn. What are you 
to do if your conscience is clear and your liver 
in order and the sun is shining ? 

May 10th. — I knew nothing whatever last year 
about gardening and this year know very little 
more, but I have dawnings of what may be done, 
and have at least made one great stride — from 
ipomaea to tea-roses. 

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is 
all round the house, but the principal part is on 
the south side and has evidently always been so. 
The south front is one-storied, a long series of 
rooms opening one into the other, and the walls 
are covered with Virginia creeper. There is a 
little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight 
of rickety wooden steps down into what seems to 
have been the only spot in the whole place that 
was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into 
the lawn and edged with privet, and in this semi¬ 
circle are eleven beds of different sizes bordered 
with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and the 
sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and 
greatly beloved by me. These beds were the only 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


15 


sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen (except 
a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each 
spring in the grass, not because it wanted to, but 
because it could not help it), and these I had sown 
with ipomaea, the whole eleven, having found a 
German gardening book, according to which ipo¬ 
maea in vast quantities was the one thing needful 
to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise. 
Nothing else in that book was recommended with 
anything like the same warmth, and being entirely 
ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary, I bought 
ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the 
eleven beds but round nearly every tree, and then 
waited in great agitation for the promised paradise 
to appear. It did not, and I learned my first 
lesson. 

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet- 
peas which made me very happy all the summer, 
and then there were some sunflowers and a few 
hollyhocks under the south windows, with Ma¬ 
donna lilies in between. But the lilies, after 
being transplanted, disappeared to my great dis¬ 
may, for how was I to know it was the way of 
lilies ? And the hollyhocks turned out to be 
rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was 
decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. 


i6 


ELIZABETH AND 


At present we are only just beginning to 
breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and 
borders and paths made in time for this summer. 
The eleven beds round the sun-dial are filled 
with roses, but I see already that I have made 
mistakes with some. As I have not a living 
soul with whom to hold communion on this or 
indeed on any matter, my only way of learning 
is by making mistakes. All eleven were to have 
been carpeted with purple pansies, but finding 
that I had not enough and that nobody had any 
to sell me, only six have got their pansies, the 
others being 3own with dwarf mignonette. Two 
of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte 
roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with 
Laurette Messimy, one with Souvenir de la Mal- 
maison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two 
with Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed 
behind the sun-dial with three sorts of red roses 
(seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt 
Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I 
am sure, a mistake, and several of the others are, 
I think, but of course I must wait and see, being 
such an ignorant person. Then I have had two 
long beds made in the grass on either side of the 
semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 17 

filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with 
Jules Finger and the Bride; and in a warm 
corner under the drawing-room windows is a bed 
of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, 
and Comtesse Riza du Parc; while farther down 
the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a 
group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, 
containing Rubens, Madame Joseph Schwartz, 
and the Flon. Edith Gifford. All these roses 
are dwarf; I have only two standards in the 
whole garden, two Madame George Bruants, and 
they look like broomsticks. How I long for the 
day when the tea-roses open their buds ! Never 
did I look forward so intensely to anything; and 
every day I go the rounds, admiring what the 
dear little things have achieved in the twenty- 
four hours in the way of new leaf or increase of 
lovely red shoot. 

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) 
are still under the south windows in a narrow 
border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot 
of which I have sown two long borders of sweet- 
peas facing the rose beds, so that my roses may 
have something almost as sweet as themselves to 
look at until the autumn, when everything is to 
make place for more tea-roses. The path leading 


i8 


ELIZABETH AND 


away from this semicircle down the garden is 
bordered with China roses, white and pink, with 
here and there a Persian Yellow. I wish now I 
had put tea-roses there, and I have misgivings as 
to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the 
Chinas, for the Chinas are such wee little baby 
things, and the Persian Yellows look as though 
they intended to be big bushes. 

There is not a creature in all this part of the 
world who could in the least understand with 
what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the 
flowering of these roses, and not a German gar¬ 
dening book that does not relegate all tea-roses to 
hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriv¬ 
ing them for ever of the breath of God. It was 
no doubt because I was so ignorant that I rushed 
in where Teutonic angels fear to tread and made 
my tea-roses face a northern winter; but they did 
face it under fir branches and leaves, and not one 
has suffered, and they are looking to-day as happy 
and as determined to enjoy themselves as any 
roses, I am sure, in Europe. 

May \\th. — To-day I am writing on the ve¬ 
randah with the three babies, more persistent than 
mosquitoes, raging round me, and already sev- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


19 


eral of the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot 
and the owners consoled when duty pointed to 
rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent and 
drooping sunbonnets ? I can see nothing but 
sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble black legs. 

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the 
gardener, and the gardener’s assistant, are the 
only people who ever go into my garden, but 
then neither are we ever out of it. The gardener 
has been here a year and has given me notice 
regularly on the first of every month, but up to 
now has been induced to stay on. On the first 
of this month he came as usual, and with deter¬ 
mination written on every feature told me he 
intended to go in June, and that nothing should 
alter his decision. I don’t think he knows much 
about gardening, but he can at least dig and 
water, and some of the things he sows come up, 
and some of the plants he plants grow, besides 
which he is the most unflaggingly industrious 
person I ever saw, and has the great merit of 
never appearing to take the faintest interest in 
what we do in the garden. So I have tried to 
keep him on, not knowing what the next one 
may be like, and when I asked him what he had 
to complain of and he replied ‘‘ Nothing,” I 


20 


ELIZABETH AND 


could only conclude that he has a personal objec¬ 
tion to me because of my eccentric preference for 
plants in groups rather than plants in lines. Per¬ 
haps, too, he does not like the extracts from 
gardening books I read to him sometimes when 
he is planting or sowing something new. Being 
so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead 
of explaining, to take the book itself out to him 
and let him have wisdom at its very source, 
administering it in doses while he worked. I 
quite recognise that this must be annoying, and 
only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through 
some stupid mistake has given me the courage to 
do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his 
disgusted face, and wish we could be photo¬ 
graphed, so that I may be reminded in twenty 
years' time, when the garden is a bower of love¬ 
liness and I learned in all its ways, of my first 
happy struggles and failures. 

All through April he was putting the peren¬ 
nials we had sown in the autumn into their per¬ 
manent places, and all through April he went 
about with a long piece of string making parallel 
lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude and 
arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review. 
Two long borders were done during my absence 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


21 


one day, and when I explained that I should like 
the third to have plants in groups and not in 
lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect 
with no bare spaces of earth to be seen, he looked 
even more gloomily hopeless than usual; and on 
my going out later on to see the result, I found 
he had planted two long borders down the sides 
of a straight walk with little lines of five plants in 
a row — first five pinks, and next to them five 
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and 
behind the pinks five rockets, and so on with 
different plants of every sort and size down to 
the end. When I protested, he said he had only 
carried out my orders and had known it would 
not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining 
borders were done after the pattern of the first 
two, and I will have patience and see how they 
look this summer, before digging them up again; 
for it becomes beginners to be humble. 

If I could only dig and plant myself! How 
much easier, besides being so fascinating, to make 
your own holes exactly where you want them and 
put in your plants exactly as you choose instead 
of giving orders that can only be half understood 
from the moment you depart from the lines laid 
down by that long piece of string! In the first 


22 


ELIZABETH AND 


ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my 
burning impatience to make the waste places 
blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in 
last year’s April during the servants’ dinner hour, 
doubly secure from the gardener by the day and 
the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and 
feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break 
it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea, and run 
back very hot and guilty into the house, and get 
into a chair and behind a book and look languid 
just in time to save my reputation. And why 
not.^ It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; 
but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had 
had a spade in Paradise and known what to do 
with it, we should not have had all that sad 
business of the apple. 

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, 
with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty 
of leisure to enjoy them ! Yet my town acquaint¬ 
ances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, 
and I don’t know what besides, and would rend 
the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a 
life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above 
all my fellows in being able to find my happiness 
so easily. I believe I should always be good if 
the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


23 


well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life 
in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the 
delight of any one of the calm evenings I have 
had this month sitting alone at the foot of the 
verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches 
all about, and the May moon hanging low over 
the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only 
more profound in its peace by the croaking of 
distant frogs and hooting of owls ? A cockchafer 
darting by close to my ear with a loud hum sends 
a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the 
reminder of past summers, and partly of fear 
lest he should get caught in my hair. The Man 
of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and 
should be killed. I would rather get the killing 
done at the end of the summer and not crush 
them out of such a pretty world at the very 
beginning of all the fun. 

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. 
My eldest baby, born in April, is five years old, 
and the youngest, born in June, is three ; so that 
the discerning will at once be able to guess the 
age of the remaining middle or May baby. 
While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks 
planted on the top of the only thing in the shape 
of a hill the garden possesses, the April baby, who 


24 


ELIZABETH AND 


had been sitting pensive on a tree stump close by, 
got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about, 
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symp¬ 
tom of terror. I stared, wondering what had come 
to her; and then I saw that a whole army of 
young cows, pasturing in a field next to the gar¬ 
den, had got through the hedge and were grazing 
perilously near my tea-roses and most precious 
belongings. The nurse and I managed to chase 
them away, but not before they had trampled 
down a border of pinks and lilies in the cruellest 
way, and made great holes in a bed of China 
roses, and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni 
clematis fliat I am trying to persuade to climb 
up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened 
to be ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers 
— as Lutheran Germany calls afternoon tea or 
its equivalent — so the nurse filled up the holes 
as well as she could with mould, burying the 
crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever of 
their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by 
looking on dejectedly. The June baby, who is 
two feet square and valiant beyond her size and 
years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and 
went after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere 
to be seen. She planted herself in front of them 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


25 


brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row and 
stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept 
them off until one of the men from the farm 
arrived with a whip, and having found the cow¬ 
herd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him 
a sound beating. The cowherd is a great hulking 
young man, much bigger than the man who beat 
him, but he took his punishment as part of the 
day's work and made no remark of any sort.. 
It could not have hurt him much through his 
leather breeches, and I think he deserved it; 
but it must be demoralising work for a strong 
young man with no brains looking after cows. 
Nobody with less imagination than a poet ought 
to take it up as a profession. 

After the June baby and I had been welcomed 
back by the other two with as many hugs as 
though we had been restored to them from great 
perils, and while we were peacefully drinking tea 
under a beech tree, I happened to look up into 
its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close 
to my head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the 
seat and caught it easily, for it could not fly, and 
how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery. 
It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the 
quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I 


26 


ELIZABETH AND 


ought to have let it go, but the temptation to 
keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a 
journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he 
has often said how much he would like to have a 
young owl and try and tame it. So I put it into 
a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near 
where it had been sitting, and which cannot be far 
from its nest and its mother. We had hardly 
subsided again to our tea when I saw two more 
balls of fluff* on the ground in the long grass and 
scarcely distinguishable at a little distance from 
small mole-hills. These were promptly united to 
their relation in the cage, and now when the Man 
of Wrath comes home, not only shall he be wel¬ 
comed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles, 
but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it 
seems wicked to take them from their mother, 
and I know that I shall let them go again some 
day — perhaps the very next time the Man of 
Wrath goes on a journey. I put a small pot of 
water in the cage, though they never could have 
tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops 
off the beech leaves. I suppose they get all the 
liquid they need from the bodies of the mice and 
other dainties provided for them by their fond 
parents. But the raindrop idea is prettier. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


27 


May i^th. — How cruel it was of me to put 
those poor little owls into a cage even for one 
night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never 
pander to the Man of Wrath's wishes again. 
This morning I got up early to see how they 
were getting on, and I found the door of the 
cage wide open and no owls to be seen. 1 
thought of course that somebody had stolen them 
— some boy from the village, or perhaps the 
chastised cowherd. But looking about I saw one 
perched high up in the branches of the beech 
tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead on 
the ground. The third was nowhere to be seen, 
and is probably safe in its nest. The parents 
must have torn at the bars of the cage until by 
chance they got the door open, and then dragged 
the little ones out and up into the tree. The one 
that is dead must have been blown off the branch, 
as it was a windy night and its neck is broken. 
There is one happy life less in the garden to-day 
through my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm 
day—just the sort of weather for young soft 
things to enjoy and grow in. The babies are 
greatly distressed, and are digging a grave, and 
preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions. 

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of 


28 


ELIZABETH AND 


arrival, and running out I breathlessly told the 
Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give 
him the owls he has so often said he would like to 
have, and how sorry I was they were gone, and 
how grievous the death of one, and so on after the 
voluble manner of women. 

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then 
he said, I am surprised at such cruelty. How 
could you make the mother owl suffer so ? She 
had never done you any harm.” 

Which sent me out of the house and into the 
garden more convinced than ever that he sang 
true who sang — 

Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone. 

May i6th .—The garden is the place I go to for 
refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house 
are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and 
admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there 
blessings crowd round me at every step — it is 
there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, 
for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse 
than they feel; it is there that all my sins and 
silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected 
and at home, and every flower and weed is a 
friend and every tree a lover. When I have been 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


29 


vexed I run out to them for comfort, and when I 
have been angry without just cause, it is there that 
I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so 
many friends ? And always the same, always 
ready to welcome me and fill me with cheerful 
thoughts. Happy children of a common Father, 
why should I, their own sister, be less content 
and joyous than they ? Even in a thunder storm, 
when other people are running into the house, I 
run out of it. I do not like thunder storms — 
they frighten me for hours before they come, 
because 1 always feel them on the way; but it is 
odd that I should go for shelter to the garden. 
I feel better there, more taken care of, more 
petted. When it thunders, the April baby says, 
“ There’s lieber Gott scolding those angels again.” 
And once, when there was a storm in the night, 
she complained loudly, and wanted to know why 
lieber Gott didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, 
as she had been so tight asleep. They all three 
speak a wonderful mixture of German and Eng¬ 
lish, adulterating the purity of their native tongue 
by putting in English words in the middle of 
a German sentence. It always reminds me of 
Justice tempered by Mercy. 

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little 


30 


ELIZABETH AND 


wood dignified by the name of the Hirschwald, 
because it is the happy hunting-ground of in¬ 
numerable deer who fight there in the autumn 
evenings, calling each other out to combat with 
hayings that ring through the silence and send 
agreeable shivers through the lonely listener. 1 
often walk there in September, late in the even¬ 
ing, and sitting on a fallen tree listen fascinated 
to their angry cries. 

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. 
The babies had never seen such things nor had 
imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirsch¬ 
wald is a little open wood of silver birches and 
springy turf starred with flowers, and there is a 
tiny stream meandering amiably about it and 
decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have 
dreams of having a little cottage built there, with 
the daisies up to the door, and no path of any 
sort—just big enough to hold myself and one 
baby inside and a purple clematis outside. Two 
rooms — a bedroom and a kitchen. How scared 
we would be at night, and how completely happy 
by day ! I know the exact spot where it should 
stand, facing south-east, so that we should get 
all the cheerfulness of the morning, and close to 
the stream, so that we might wash our plates 




HER GERMAN GARDEN 


31 


among the flags. Sometimes, whep in the mood 
for society, we would invite the remaining babies 
to tea and entertain them with wild strawberries 
on plates of horse-chestnut leaves; but no one 
less innocent and easily pleased than a baby 
would be permitted to darken the effulgence 
of our sunny cottage — indeed, I don’t suppose 
that anybody wiser would care to come. Wise 
people want so many things before they can even 
begin to enjoy themselves, and I feel perpetually 
apologetic when with them, for only being able 
to offer them that which I love best myself— 
apologetic, and ashamed of being so easily con¬ 
tented. 

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest 
town (it took us the whole afternoon to get there) 
the women after dinner were curious to know how 
I had endured the winter, cut off* from everybody 
and snowed up sometimes for weeks. 

‘‘Ah, these husbands ! ” sighed an ample lady, 
lugubriously shaking her head; “ they shut up 
their wives because it suits them, and don’t care 
what their sufferings are.” 

Then the others sighed and shook their heads 
too, for the ample lady was a great local poten¬ 
tate, and one began to tell how another dreadful 


32 


ELIZABETH AND 


husband had brought his young wife into the 
country and had kept her there, concealing her 
beauty and accomplishments from the public in 
a most cruel manner, and how, after spending a 
certain number of years in alternately weeping 
and producing progeny, she had quite lately run 
away with somebody unspeakable — I think it 
was the footman, or the baker, or some one of 
that sort. 

“ But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as 
I could put in a word. 

“ Ah, a good little wife, making the best of 
it,” and the female potentate patted my hand, 
but continued gloomily to shake her head. 

“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter 
entirely alone,” asserted another lady, the wife of 
a high military authority and not accustomed to 
be contradicted. 

“ But 1 am.” 

“ But how can you possibly be at your age ? 
No, it is not possible.” 

“ But I am/' 

“Your husband ought to bring you to town 
in the winter.” 

“ But I don't want to be brought to town.” 

“And not let you waste your best years buried.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


33 


“ But I like being buried.” 

“ Such solitude is not right.” 

‘‘But I’m not solitary.” 

“ And can come to no good.” She was get¬ 
ting quite angry. 

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last 
remark, and renewed shaking of heads. 

“ I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted 
when they were a little quieter; “ I sleighed and 
skated, and then there were the children, and 
shelves and shelves full of—” I was going to 
say books, but stopped. Reading is an occupa¬ 
tion for men; for women it is reprehensible waste 
of time. And how could I talk to them of the 
happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, 
or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days ? 

“ It is entirely my doing that we have come 
down here,” I proceeded, “ and my husband 
only did it to please me.” 

“ Such a good little wife,” repeated the patron¬ 
ising potentate, again patting my hand with an air 
of understanding all about it, “really an excellent 
little wife. But you must not let your husband 
have his own way too much, my dear, and take 
my advice and insist on his bringing you to town 
next winter.” 


34 


ELIZABETH AND 


And then they fell to talking about their 
cooks, having settled to their entire satisfaction 
that my fate was probably lying in wait for me 
too, lurking perhaps at that very moment behind 
the apparently harmless brass buttons of the man 
in the hall with my cloak. 

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed 
again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the 
garden and drove between the quiet trees to 
the pretty old house; and when I went into 
the library, with its four windows open to the 
moonlight and the scent, and looked round at 
the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no 
sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here 
I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose 
with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful 
I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me 
here and given me a heart to understand my own 
blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that 
I had just seen — a life spent with the odours of 
other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils, and the 
noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, 
and parties and tattle for all amusement. 

But I must confess to having felt sometimes 
quite crushed when some grand person, examin¬ 
ing the details of my home through her eyeglass. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


35 


and coolly dissecting all that I so much prize 
from the convenient distance of the open window, 
has finished up by expressing sympathy with my 
loneliness, and on my protesting that I like it, 
has murmured, anspruchslosT Then indeed 
I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants; 
but only for a moment, and only under the 
withering influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, 
the owner’s spirit is the same spirit as that which 
dwells in my servants — girls whose one idea of 
happiness is to live in a town where there are 
others of their sort with whom to drink beer and 
dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion for 
being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of 
being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly 
incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite 
well for weeks together, hardly aware, ex'cept for 
the pervading peace, that I have been alone at 
all. Not but what I like to have people staying 
with me for a few days, or even for a few weeks, 
should they be as anspruchslos as I am myself, 
and content with simple joys ; only, any one who 
comes here and would be happy must have some¬ 
thing in him ; if he be a mere blank creature, 
empty of head and heart, he will very probably 
find it dull. I should like my house to be often 


3^ 


ELIZABETH AND 


full if I could find people capable of enjoying 
themselves. They should be welcomed and 
sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels 
me to confess that, though it pleases me to see 
them come, it pleases me just as much to see 
them go. 

On some very specially divine days, like to¬ 
day, I have actually longed for some one else to 
be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There 
has been rain in the night, and the whole garden 
seems to be singing — not the untiring birds 
only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass 
and trees, the lilac bushes — oh, those lilac 
bushes! They are all out to-day, and the 
garden is drenched with the scent. I have 
brought in armfuls, the picking is such a 
delight, and every pot and bowl and tub in 
the house is filled with purple glory, and the 
servants think there is going to be a party and 
are extra nimble, and I go from room to room 
gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all 
flung open so as to join the scent within to the 
scent without; and the servants gradually dis¬ 
cover that there is no party, and wonder why 
the house should be filled with flowers for one 
woman by herself, and I long more and more 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


37 


for a kindred spirit — it seems so greedy to 
have so much loveliness to oneself—but kindred 
spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost 
as well cry for the moon. It is true that my 
garden is full of friends, only they are — dumb. 

June 2rd. — This is such an out-of-the-way 
corner of the world that it requires quite unusual 
energy to get here at all, and I am thus deliv¬ 
ered from casual callers; while, on the other 
hand, people I love, or people who love me, 
which is much the same thing, are not likely 
to be deterred from coming by the roundabout 
train journey and the long drive at the end. 
Not the least of my many blessings is that we 
have only one neighbour. If you have to have 
neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there 
should be only one; for with people dropping 
in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how 
are you to get on with your life, I should like 
to know, and read your books, and dream your 
dreams to your satisfaction ? Besides, there is 
always the certainty that either you or the 
dropper-in will say something that would have 
been better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror 
of gossip and mischief-making. A woman's 


38 


ELIZABETH AND 


tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult 
thing in the world to keep in order, and things 
slip off it with a facility nothing short of appal¬ 
ling at the very moment when it ought to be 
most quiet. In such cases the only safe course 
is to talk steadily about cooks and children, and 
to pray that the visit may not be too prolonged, 
for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found 
to be the best of all subjects — the most phleg¬ 
matic flush into life at the mere word, and the 
joys and sufferings connected with them are 
experiences common to us all. 

Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both 
busy and charming, with a whole troop of flaxen¬ 
haired little children to keep them occupied, 
besides the business of their large estate. Our 
intercourse is arranged on lines of the most beau¬ 
tiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, and 
she returns the call a fortnight later ; they ask us 
to dinner in the summer, and we ask them to 
dinner in the winter. By strictly keeping to this, 
we avoid all danger of that closer friendship which 
is only another name for frequent quarrels. She 
is a pattern of what a German country lady should 
be, and is not only a pretty woman but an ener¬ 
getic and practical one, and the combination is, 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


39 


to say the least, effective. She is up at daylight 
superintending the feeding of the stock, the but¬ 
ter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; 
a thousand things get done while most people are 
fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at break¬ 
fast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other 
farms on the place, to rate the mamsells,” as the 
head women are called, to poke into every corner, 
lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid 
eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairy¬ 
maid’s ears. We are allowed by law to adminis¬ 
ter “slight corporal punishment” to our ser¬ 
vants, it being left entirely to individual taste 
to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neigh¬ 
bour really seems to enjoy using this privilege. 
Judging from the way she talks about it. I would 
give much to be able to peep through a keyhole 
and see the dauntless little lady, terrible in her 
wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the 
ears of some great strapping girl big enough to 
eat her. 

The making of cheese and butter and sausages 
excellently well is a work which requires brains, and 
is, to my thinking, a very admirable form of activ¬ 
ity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the 
intelligent. That my neighbour is intelligent is 


40 


ELIZABETH AND 


at once made evident by the bright alertness of 
her eyes — eyes that nothing escapes, and that 
only gain in prettiness by being used to some 
good purpose. She is a recognised authority for 
miles around on the mysteries of sausage-making, 
the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine ; 
and with all her manifold duties and daily pro¬ 
longed absences from home, her children are 
patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear 
little German children, with white pigtails and 
fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Who 
shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and 
unworthy of a high order of intelligence ? I 
protest that to me it is a beautiful life, full of 
wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for 
those listless moments of depression and bore¬ 
dom, and of wondering what you will do next, 
that leave wrinkles round a pretty woman's eyes, 
and are not unknown even to the most brilliant. 
But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think 
I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents 
not being of the energetic and organising variety, 
but rather of that order which makes their owner 
almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of 
poetry and wander out to where the kingcups 
grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


41 


stream, forget the very existence of everything but 
green pastures and still waters, and the glad blow¬ 
ing of the wind across the joyous fields. And 
it would make me perfectly wretched to be con¬ 
fronted by ears so refractory as to require boxing. 

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my 
solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realise 
how absolutely alone each individual is, and how 
far away from his neighbour; and while they 
talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to 
come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impas¬ 
sable distance that separates one's own soul from 
the soul of the person sitting in the next chair. 
I am speaking of comparative strangers, people 
who are forced to stay a certain time by the 
eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you 
grope about after common interests and shrink 
back into your shell on finding that you have 
none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me 
and I grow each minute more benumbed and 
speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air 
and look vacant, and the callers go through the 
usual form of wondering who they most take after, 
generally settling the question by saying that the 
May baby, who is the beauty, is like her father, 
and that the two more or less plain ones are the 


42 


ELIZABETH AND 


image of me, and this decision, though I know it 
of old and am sure it is coming, never fails to 
depress me as much as though I heard it for the 
first time. The babies are very little and inoffen¬ 
sive and good, and it is hard that they should be 
used as a means of filling up gaps in conversa¬ 
tion, and their features pulled to pieces one by 
one, and all their weak points noted and criti¬ 
cised, while they stand smiling shyly in the 
operator’s face, their very smile drawing forth 
comments on the shape of their mouths; but, 
after all, it does not occur very often, and they 
are one of those few interests one has in common 
with other people, as everybody seems to have 
babies. A garden, I have discovered, is by no 
means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few 
persons really love theirs — they all pretend they 
do, but you can hear by the very tone of their 
voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About 
June their interest is at its warmest, nourished 
by agreeable supplies of strawberries and roses; 
but on reflection I don’t know a single person 
within twenty miles who really cares for his garden, 
or has discovered the treasures of happiness that 
are buried in it, and are to be found if sought for 
diligently, and if needs be with tears. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


43 


It is after these rare calls that I experience the 
only moments of depression from which I ever 
suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well- 
nourished person, for allowing even a single 
precious hour of life to be spoilt by anything so 
indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, 
and clothed enough, and warmed enough, and of 
having everything you can reasonably desire — 
on the least provocation you are made uncom¬ 
fortable and unhappy by such abstract discomforts 
as being shut out from a nearer approach to your 
neighbour's soul; which is on the face of it fool¬ 
ish, the probability being that he hasn’t got one. 

The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit 
of inspiration, put them right along the very front 
of two borders, and I don’t know what his feel¬ 
ings can be now that they are all flowering and 
the plants behind are completely hidden; but I 
have learned another lesson, and no future gar¬ 
dener shall be allowed to run riot among my rock¬ 
ets in quite so reckless a fashion. They are 
charming things, as delicate in colour as in scent, 
and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the 
room with fragrance. Single rows, however, are 
a mistake •, I had masses of them planted in the 
grass, and these show how lovely they can be. 


44 


ELIZABETH AND 


A border full of rockets, mauve and white, and 
nothing else, must be beautiful; but I don’t know 
how long they last nor what they look like when 
they have done flowering. This I shall find out 
in a week or two, I suppose. Was ever a would- 
be gardener left so entirely to his own blunder¬ 
ing ? No doubt it would be a gain of years to 
the garden if I were not forced to learn solely by 
my failures, and if I had some kind creature to 
tell me when to do things. At present the only 
flowers in the garden are the rockets, the pansies 
in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas — 
mollis and pontica. The azaleas have been and 
still are gorgeous ; 1 only planted them this spring 
and they almost at once began to flower, and the 
sheltered corner they are in looks as though it 
were filled with imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. 
Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate shade — 
what they will be next year and in succeeding 
years when the bushes are bigger, I can imagine 
from the way they have begun life. On gray, 
dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next 
autumn I shall make a great bank of them in 
front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy 
nook. My tea-roses are covered with buds which 
will not open for at least another week, so I con- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


45 


elude this is not the sort of climate where they 
will flower from the very beginning of June to 
November, as they are said to do. 

July iith. — There has been no rain since the 
day before Whitsunday, five weeks ago, which 
partly, but not entirely, accounts for the disap¬ 
pointment my beds have been. The dejected 
gardener went mad soon after Whitsuntide, and 
had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going 
about with a spade in one hand and a revolver in 
the other, explaining that he felt safer that way, 
and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes civilised 
beings who respect each other’s prejudices, until 
one day, when 1 mildly asked him to tie up a fallen 
creeper — and after he bought the revolver my 
tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and 
I quite left off reading to him aloud — he turned 
round, looked me straight in the face for the first 
time since he has been here, and said, ‘‘ Do I look 

like Graf X-(a great local celebrity), or like 

a monkey ? ” After which there was nothing for 
it but to get him into an asylum as expeditiously 
as possible. There was no gardener to be had in 
his place, and I have only just succeeded in get¬ 
ting one; so that what with the drought, and the 



46 


ELIZABETH AND 


neglect, and the gardener's madness, and my blun¬ 
ders, the garden is in a sad condition; but even 
in a sad condition it is the dearest place in the 
world, and all my mistakes only make me more 
determined to persevere. 

The long borders, where the rockets were, are 
looking dreadful. The rockets have done flower¬ 
ing, and, after the manner of rockets in other 
walks of life, have degenerated into sticks ; and 
nothing else in those borders intends to bloom 
this summer. The giant poppies I had planted 
out in them in April have either died off or re¬ 
mained quite small, and so have the columbines; 
here and there a delphinium droops unwillingly, 
and that is all. I suppose poppies cannot stand 
being moved, or perhaps they were not watered 
enough at the time of transplanting; anyhow, 
those borders are going to be sown to-morrow 
with more poppies for next year; for poppies I 
will have, whether they like it or not, and they 
shall not be touched, only thinned out. 

Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, 
directly I come out and sit under the trees, and 
look at the dappled sky, and see the sunshine on 
the cornfields away on the plain, all the disappoint¬ 
ment smooths itself out, and it seems impossible 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


47 


to be sad and discontented when everything about 
me is so radiant and kind. 

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, 
that, sitting here in this shady corner watching the 
lazy shadows stretching themselves across the grass, 
and listening to the rooks quarrelling in the tree- 
tops, I almost expect to hear English church bells 
ringing for the afternoon service. But the church 
is three miles off, has no bells, and no afternoon 
service. Once a fortnight we go to morning prayer 
at eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with 
a room behind, whither we can retire unobserved 
when the sermon is too long or our flesh too weak, 
and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black- 
robed parson. In winter the church is bitterly 
cold; it is not heated, and we sit muffled up in 
more furs than ever we wear out of doors ; but it 
would of course be very wicked for the parson to 
wear furs, however cold he may be, so he puts on 
a great many extra coats under his gown, and, as 
the winter progresses, swells to a prodigious size. 
We know when spring is coming by the reduction 
in his figure. The congregation sit at ease while 
the parson does the praying for them, and while 
they are droning the long-drawn-out chorales, he 
retires into a little wooden box just big enough to 


48 


ELIZABETH AND 


hold him. He does not come out until he thinks 
we have sung enough, nor do we stop until his 
appearance gives us the signal. I have often 
thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in 
his box and left us to go on singing. I am sure 
we should never dare to stop, unauthorised by the 
Church. I asked him once what he did in there ; 
he looked very shocked at such a profane ques¬ 
tion, and made an evasive reply. 

If it were not for the garden, a German Sun¬ 
day would be a terrible day; but in the garden 
on that day there is a sigh of relief and more 
profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or 
fidgeting; only the little flowers themselves and 
the whispering trees. 

I have been much afflicted again lately by 
visitors — not stray callers to be got rid of after 
a due administration of tea and things you are 
sorry afterwards that you said, but people stay¬ 
ing in the house and not to be got rid of at all. 
All June was lost to me in this way, and it was 
from first to last a radiant month of heat and 
beauty; but a garden where you meet the people 
you saw at breakfast, and will see again at lunch 
and dinner, is not a place to be happy in. Be¬ 
sides, they had a knack of finding out my favour- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


49 


ite seats and lounging in them just when I longed 
to lounge myself; and they took books out of 
the library with them, and left them face down¬ 
wards on the seats all night to get well drenched 
with dew, though they might have known that 
what is meat for roses is poison for books; and 
they gave me to understand that if they had had 
the arranging of the garden it would have been 
finished long ago — whereas I don’t believe a 
garden ever is finished. They have all gone 
now, thank heaven, except one, so that I have 
a little breathing space before others begin to 
arrive. It seems that the place interests people, 
and that there is a sort of novelty in staying in 
such a deserted corner of the world, for they 
were in a perpetual state of mild amusement at 
being here at all. 

Irais is the only one left. She is a young 
woman with a beautiful, refined face, and her 
eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly 
lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the 
salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the process, 
although providence (taking my shape) has caused 
salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals 
down the table. She lunched to-day on beer, 
Schweine-koteletteriy and cabbage-salad with cara- 


50 


ELIZABETH AND 


way seeds in it, and now I hear her through the 
open window, extemporising touching melodies 
in her charming, cooing voice. She is thin, frail, 
intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. 
What better proof can be needed to establish the 
superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after 
such meals he can produce such music ? Cabbage- 
salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt 
its utility as a means of encouraging thoughtful¬ 
ness ; nor will I quarrel with it, since it results 
so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the 
manure that results in roses, and I give it to 
Irais every day to make her sing. She is the 
sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a 
charming trick of making up songs as she goes 
along. When she begins, I go and lean out of 
the window and look at my little friends out 
there in the borders while listening to her music, 
and feel full of pleasant sadness and regret. It 
is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to 
be sad about. 

The April baby came panting up just as I had 
written that, the others hurrying along behind, 
and with flaming cheeks displayed for my admira¬ 
tion three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, 
that she was carrying in her pinafore, and that 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


51 


had just been found motherless in the wood¬ 
shed. 

“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much! ” 

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for 
she had been once before this afternoon on pur¬ 
pose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on 
the grass at my feet, to ask about the lieher Gotty 
it being Sunday and her pious little nurse’s con¬ 
versation having run, as it seems, on heaven and 
angels. 

Her questions about the lieber Gott are better 
left unrecorded, and I was relieved when she 
began about the angels. 

“ What do they wear for clothes ? ” she asked 
in her German-English. 

“ Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I 
answered, “ in beautiful, long dresses, and with, 
big, white wings.” 

“ Feathers ? ” she asked. 

“ I suppose so, — and long dresses, all white 
and beautiful.” 

“ Are they girlies ? ” 

Girls ? Ye—es.” 

“ Don’t boys go into the Himmel? ” 

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.” 

“ And then what do they wear ? ” 


52 


ELIZABETH AND 


‘‘Why, the same as all the other angels, I 
suppose.” 

“ Bw esses ? ” 

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways 
as though she suspected me of making jokes. 
“ What a funny Mummy ! ” she said, evidently 
much amused. She has a fat little laugh that is 
very infectious. 

“ I think,” said I, gravely, “ you had better go 
and play with the other babies.” 

She did not answer, and sat still a moment 
watching the clouds. I began writing again. 

“ Mummy,” she said presently. 

“Well?” 

“ Where do the angels get their dwesses ? ” 

I hesitated. “From lieber Gott,' I said. 

“Are there shops in the Himmel? ” 

“Shops? No.” 

“ But, then, where does lieber Gott buy their 
dwesses ? ” 

“ Now run away like a good baby ; I’m busy.” 

“ But you said yesterday, when I asked about 
lieber Gott^ that you would tell about Him on 
Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about 
Him.” 

There was nothing for it but resignation, so I 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


53 


put down my pencil with a sigh. ‘‘ Call the 
others, then.'* 

She ran away, and presently they all three 
emerged from the bushes one after the other, and 
tried all together to scramble on to my knee., 
The April baby got the knee as she always seems 
to get everything, and the other two had to sit 
on the grass. 

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to 
future parsonic probings. The April baby’s eyes 
opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder 
and redder. I was surprised at the breathless 
interest she took in the story — the other two 
were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. 
I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming 
swords and announced that that was all, when she 
burst out, ‘‘ Now /’// tell about it. Once upon a 
time there was Adam and Eva, and they had 
plenty of clothes, and there was no snake, and 
lieher Gott wasn't angry with them, and they 
could eat as many apples as they liked, and was 
happy for ever and ever — there now! ” 

She began to jump up and down defiantly on 
my knee. 

‘‘But that’s not the story,” I said rather 
helplessly. 




54 


ELIZABETH AND 


‘^Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now 
another.” 

But these stories are true^' I said severely; 
“and it’s no use my telling them if you make 
them up your own way afterwards.” 

“ Another ! another ! ” she shrieked, jumping 
up and down with redoubled energy, all her 
silvery curls flying. 

I began about Noah and the flood. 

“ Did it rain so badly ? ” she asked with a face 
of the deepest concern and interest. 

“ Yes, all day long and all night long for weeks 
and weeks-” 

“ And was everybody so wet ? ” 

“ Yes-” 

“ But why didn’t they open their umbwellas ? ” 

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the 
tea-tray. 

“ I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, 
putting her off my knee, greatly relieved; “ you 
must all go to Anna now and have tea.” 

“ I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, 
not having hitherto opened her lips; “ she is a 
stupid girl.” 

The other two stood transfixed with horror at 
this statement, for, besides being naturally ex- 




HER GERMAN GARDEN 


55 


tremely polite, and at all times anxious not to 
hurt any one's feelings, they had been brought up 
to love and respect their kind little nurse. 

The April baby recovered her speech first, and 
lifting her finger, pointed it at the criminal in just 
indignation. “Such a child will never go into the 
Himmel^' she said with great emphasis, and the 
air of one who delivers judgment. 

September i^th, — This is the month of quiet 
days, crimson creepers, and blackberries ; of mel¬ 
low afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea 
under the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; 
of wood-fires in the library in the chilly evenings. 
The babies go out in the afternoon and black¬ 
berry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big 
and fat, sit cleaning themselves on the sunny 
verandah steps; the Man of Wrath shoots par¬ 
tridges across the distant stubble; and the summer 
seems as though it would dream on for ever. It 
is hard to believe that in three months we shall 
probably be snowed up and certainly be cold. 
There is a feeling about this month that reminds 
me of March and the early days of April, when 
spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the 
garden holds its breath in expectation. There is 


56 


ELIZABETH AND 


the same mildness in the air, and the sky and 
grass have the same look as then ; but the leaves 
tell a different tale, and the reddening creeper on 
the house is rapidly approaching its last and 
loveliest glory. 

My roses have behaved as well on the whole 
as was to be expected, and the Viscountess Folke- 
stones and Laurette Messimys have been most 
beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things 
in the garden, each flower an exquisite loose 
cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at the base 
to a yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred 
standard tea-roses for planting next month, half 
of which are Viscountess Folkestones, because the 
tea-roses have such a way of hanging their little 
heads that one has to kneel down to be able to 
see them well in the dwarf forms — not but what 
I entirely approve of kneeling before such perfect 
beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am 
going to put standards down each side of the 
walk under the south windows, and shall have 
the flowers on a convenient level for worship. 
My only fear is, that they will stand the winter 
less well than the dwarf sorts, being so difficult to 
pack up snugly. The Persian Yellows and Bicol- 
prs have been, as I predicted, a mistake among 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


57 


the tea-roses; they only flower twice in the season 
and all the rest of the time look dull and 
moping; and then the Persian Yellows have such 
an odd smell and so many insects inside them 
eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea- 
roses to put in their place, as they all come out 
next month and are to be grouped in the grass; 
and the semicircle being immediately under the 
windows, besides having the best position in the 
place, must be reserved solely for my choicest 
treasures. I have had a great many disappoint¬ 
ments, but feel as though I were really beginning 
to learn. Humility, and the most patient perse¬ 
verance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as 
rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used 
as a stepping-stone to something better. 

I had a visitor last week who knows a great 
deal about gardening and has had much practi¬ 
cal experience. When I heard he was coming, 
I felt I wanted to put my arms right round my 
garden and hide it from him ; but what was my 
surprise and delight when he said, after having 
gone all over it, ‘‘Well, I think you have done 
wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I was! It 
was so entirely unexpected, and such a complete 
novelty after the remarks I have been listening 


58 


ELIZABETH AND 


to all the summer. I could have hugged that 
discerning and indulgent critic, able to look 
beyond the result to the intention, and appreciat¬ 
ing the difficulties of every kind that had been in 
the way. After that I opened my heart to him, 
and listened reverently to all he had to say, and 
treasured up his kind and encouraging advice, 
and wished he could stay here a whole year and 
help me through the seasons. But he went, as 
people one likes always do go, and he was the 
only guest I have had whose departure made me 
sorry. 

The people I love are always somewhere else 
and not able to come to me, while I can at any 
time fill the house with visitors about whom I 
know little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more 
of those absent ones, I would not love them so 
well — at least, that is what I think on wet days 
when the wind is howling round the house and 
all nature is overcome with grief; and it has 
actually happened once or twice when great 
friends have been staying with me that I have 
wished, when they left, I might not see them 
again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact 
is, that no friendship can stand the breakfast 
test, and here, in the country, we invariably 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


59 


think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civili¬ 
sation has done away with curl-papers, yet at 
that hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly 
screwed up in them as was ever her grand¬ 
mother’s hair; and though my body comes down 
mechanically, having been trained that way by 
punctual parents, my soul never thinks of begin¬ 
ning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, 
and never does so completely till it has been 
taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. 
Who can begin conventional amiability the first 
thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage 
instincts and natural tendencies ; it is the triumph 
of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am con¬ 
vinced that the Muses and the Graces never 
thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed. 

November iith. — When the gray November 
weather came, and hung its soft dark clouds low 
and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed 
fields and the vivid emerald of the stretches of 
winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed my heart 
down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant 
things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, 
the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of 
elders. A great need of something to lean on, and 


6 o 


ELIZABETH AND 


a great weariness of independence and responsi¬ 
bility took possession of my soul; and looking 
round for support and comfort in that transitory 
mood, the emptiness of the present and the 
blankness of the future sent me back to the 
past with all its ghosts. Why should I not go 
and see the place where I was born, and where 
1 lived so long; the place where I was so magnifi¬ 
cently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close 
to heaven, so near to hell, always either up on 
a cloud of glory, or down in the depths with 
the waters of despair closing over my head ? 
Cousins live in it now,' distant cousins, loved 
with the exact measure of love usually bestowed 
on cousins who reign in one's stead; cousins of 
practical views, who have dug up the flower-beds 
and planted cabbages where roses grew; and 
though through all the years since my father's 
death I have held my head so high that it hurt, 
and loftily refused to listen to their repeated 
suggestions that I should revisit my old home, 
something in the sad listlessness of the Novem¬ 
ber days sent my spirit back to old times with 
a persistency that would not be set aside, and I 
woke from my musings surprised to find myself 
sick with longing. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


6 i 


It is foolish but natural to quarrel with one's 
cousins, and especially foolish and natural when 
they have done nothing, and are mere victims 
of chance. Is it their fault that my not being 
a boy placed the shoes I should otherwise have 
stepped into at their disposal? I know it is 
not; but their blamelessness does not make me 
love them more. Noch ein dummes Frauen- 
zimmer! ” cried my father, on my arrival into 
the world — he had three of them already, and 
I was his last hope,—and a dummes Frauenzimmer 
I have remained ever since; and that is why for 
years I would have no dealings with the cousins in 
possession, and that is why, the other day, over¬ 
come by the tender influence of the weather, the 
purely sentimental longing to join hands again 
with my childhood was enough to send all my 
pride to the winds, and to start me off without 
warning and without invitation on my pilgrimage. 

I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, 
and if I had lived in the Middle Ages would have 
spent most of my time on the way to Rome. 
The pilgrims, leaving all their cares at home, the 
anxieties of their riches or their debts, the wife 
that worried and the children that disturbed, 
took only their sins with them, and turning 


62 


ELIZABETH AND 


their backs on their obligations, set out with 
that sole burden, and perhaps a cheerful heart. 
H ow cheerful my heart would have been, starting 
on a fine morning, with the smell of the spring 
in my nostrils, fortified by the approval of those 
left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings 
of my family, with every step getting farther from 
the suffocation of daily duties, out into the wide 
fresh world, out into the glorious free world, so 
poor, so penitent, and so happy ! My dream, 
even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend 
that I love, leisurely wandering from place to 
place, with no route arranged and no object in 
view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger 
all day, as we choose; but the question of 
luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one 
of the rocks on which my plans have been ship¬ 
wrecked, and the other is the certain censure of 
relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, 
and having no taste for noonday naps under 
hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans 
before they had grown to maturity by the honest 
horror of their cry, “ How very unpleasant if 
you were to meet any one you know ! ” The 
relative of five hundred years back would simply 
have said, “ How holy ! ” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


63 


My father had the same liking for pilgrim¬ 
ages— indeed, it is evident that I have it from 
him — and he encouraged it in me when I was little, 
taking me with him on his pious journeys to places 
he had lived in as a boy. Often have we been 
together to the school he was at in Brandenburg, 
and spent pleasant days wandering about the old 
town on the edge of one of those lakes that lie 
in a chain in that wide green plain; and often 
have we been in Potsdam, where he was 
quartered as a lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrim¬ 
age including hours in the woods around and in 
the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second 
volume of Carlyle’s Frederick under my father’s 
arm ; and often did we spend long summer days 
at the house in the Mark, at the head of the 
same blue chain of lakes, where his mother spent 
her young years, and where, though it belonged 
to cousins, like everything else that was worth 
having, we could' wander about as we chose, 
for it was empty, and sit in the deep windows 
of rooms where there was no furniture, and the 
painted Venuses and cupids on the ceiling still 
smiled irrelevantly and stretched their futile 
wreaths above the emptiness beneath. And 
while we sat and rested, my father told me, as 


64 


ELIZABETH AND 


my grandmother had a hundred times told him, 
all that had happened in those rooms in the far- 
off days when people danced and sang and 
laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever 
to be old or sorry. 

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone’s 
throw of the great iron gates, with two very old 
lime trees in front of it, where we used to lunch 
on our arrival at a little table spread with a red 
and blue check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping 
into our soup, and the bees humming in the 
scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of 
the house by my side as I write, done from the 
lake in old times, with a boat full of ladies in 
hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth 
playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place 
were those I loved the best. 

But the stories my father told me, sometimes 
odd enough stories to tell a little girl, as we wan¬ 
dered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the 
stone balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or 
picked the pale dog-roses in the hedges, or lay in the 
boat in a shady reed-grown bay while he smoked 
to keep the mosquitoes off, were after all only tra¬ 
ditions, imparted to me in small doses from time 
to time, when his earnest desire not to raise his 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 65 

remarks above the level of dulness supposed to 
be wholesome for Backjische was neutralised by an 
impulse to share his thoughts with somebody 
who would laugh ; whereas the place I was bound 
for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, 
first-hand memories of all the enchanted years 
that lie between two and eighteen. How en¬ 
chanted those years are is made more and more 
clear to me the older I grow. There has been 
nothing in the least like them since; and though 
I have forgotten most of what happened six 
months ago, every incident, almost every day of 
those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in 
my memory. 

But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, 
altogether cousinly in my behaviour towards the 
people in possession. The invitations to revisit 
the old home had ceased. The cousins had 
grown tired of refusals, and had left me alone. 
I did not even know who lived in it now, it was 
so long since I had had any news. For two days 
I fought against the strong desire to go there that 
had suddenly seized me, and assured myself that 
I would not go, that it would be absurd to go, 
undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not 
know them and would be in an awkward position. 


66 


ELIZABETH AND 


and that I was old enough to know better. But 
who can foretell from one hour to the next what 
a woman will do ? And when does she ever know 
better? On the third morning I set out as hope¬ 
fully as though it were the most natural thing 
in the world to fall unexpectedly upon hitherto 
consistently neglected cousins, and expect to be 
received with open arms. 

It was a complicated journey, and lasted several 
hours. During the first part, when it was still 
dark, I glowed with enthusiasm, with the spirit 
of adventure, with delight at the prospect of so 
soon seeing the loved place again ; and thought 
with wonder of the long years I had allowed to 
pass since last I was there. Of what I should 
say to the cousins, and of how I should introduce 
myself into their midst, I did not think at all: 
the pilgrim spirit was upon me, the unpractical 
spirit that takes no thought for anything, but 
simply wanders along enjoying its own emotions. 
It was a quiet, sad morning, and there was a 
thick mist. By the time I w^s in the little train 
on the light railway that passed through the vil¬ 
lage nearest my old home, I had got over my 
first enthusiasm, and had entered the stage of 
critically examining the changes that had been 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


67 


made in the last ten years. It was so misty that 
I could see nothing of the familiar country from 
the carriage windows, only the ghosts of pines in 
the front row of the forests ; but the railway 
itself was a new departure, unknown in our day, 
when we used to drive over ten miles of deep, 
sandy forest roads to and from the station, and 
although most people would have called it an evi¬ 
dent and great improvement, it was an innovation 
due, no doubt, to the zeal and energy of the 
reigning cousin ; and who was he, thought I, 
that he should require more conveniences than 
my father had found needful ? It was no use 
my telling myself that in my father’s time the era 
of light railways had not dawned, and that if it 
had, we should have done our utmost to secure 
one; the thought of my cousin, stepping into my 
shoes, and then altering them, was odious to me. 
By the time I was walking up the hill from the 
station I had got over this feeling too, and had 
entered a third stage of wondering uneasily what 
in the world I should do next. Where was the 
intrepid courage with which I had started ^ At 
the top of the first hill I sat down to consider 
this question in detail, for I was very near the 
house now, and felt I wanted time. Where, in- 


68 


ELIZABETH AND 


deed, was the courage and joy of the morning ? 
It had vanished so completely that I could only 
suppose that it must be lunch time, the observa¬ 
tions of years having led to the discovery that 
the higher sentiments and virtues fly affrighted 
on the approach of lunch, and none fly quicker 
than courage. So I ate the lunch I had brought 
with me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but 
it was chilly, made up of sandwiches and pears, 
and it had to be eaten under a tree at the edge 
of a field; and it was November, and the mist 
was thicker than ever and very wet— the grass 
was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, 
I was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet 
with it. Nobody’s spirits can keep up under 
such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sand¬ 
wiches, I deplored the headlong courage more 
with each mouthful that had torn me from a 
warm, dry home where I was appreciated, and had 
brought me first to the damp tree in the damp 
field, and when I had finished my lunch and 
dessert of cold pears, was going to drag me into 
the midst of a circle of unprepared and aston¬ 
ished cousins. Vast sheep loomed through the 
mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up 
a perpetual, irritating yap. In the fog I could 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


69 


hardly tell where I was, though I knew I must 
have played there a hundred times as a child. 
After the fashion of woman directly she is not 
perfectly warm and perfectly comfortable, I began 
to consider the uncertainty of human life, and to 
shake my head in gloomy approval as lugubri¬ 
ous lines of pessimistic poetry suggested them¬ 
selves to my mind. 

Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want 
to do anything, to do it in the way consecrated 
by custom, more especially if you are a woman. 
The rattle of a carriage along the road just behind 
me, and the fact that I started and turned sud¬ 
denly hot, drove this truth home to my soul. 
The mist hid me, and the carriage, no doubt full 
of cousins, drove on in the direction of the house ; 
but what an absurd position I was in ! Suppose 
the kindly mist had lifted, and revealed me lunch¬ 
ing in the wet on their property, the cousin of the 
short and lofty letters, the unangenehme Elisabeth 1 
‘‘ Die war doch immer verdreht^' I could imagine 
them hastily muttering to each other, before 
advancing wreathed in welcoming smiles. It 
gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and 
I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the 
remains of my lunch under the gigantic molehill 


70 


ELIZABETH AND 


on which I had been sitting, asked myself ner¬ 
vously what I proposed to do next. Should I 
walk back to the village, go to the Gasthof^ write 
a letter craving permission to call on my cousins, 
and wait there till an answer came ? It would be 
a discreet and sober course to pursue; the next 
best thing to having written before leaving home. 
But the Gasthof of a north German village is a 
dreadful place, and the remembrance of one in 
which I had taken refuge once from a thunder¬ 
storm was still so vivid that nature itself cried out 
against this plan. The mist, if anything, was 
growing denser. I knew every path and gate in 
the place. What if I gave up all hope of seeing 
the house, and went through the little door 
in the wall at the bottom of the garden, and 
confined myself for this once to that? In such 
weather I would be able to wander round as I 
pleased, without the least risk of being seen by 
or meeting any cousins, and it was after all the 
gar4en that lay nearest my heart. What a 
delight it would be to creep into it unobserved, 
and revisit all the corners I so well remembered, 
and slip out again and get away safely without 
any need of explanations, assurances, protesta¬ 
tions, displays of affection, without any need, in 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


71 

a word, of that exhausting form of conversation, 
so dear to relations, known as Redensarten ! 

The mist tempted me. I think if it had been 
a fine day I would have gone soberly to the 
Gasthof and written the conciliatory letter ; but 
the temptation was too great, it was altogther 
irresistible, and in ten minutes I had found the 
gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was 
standing with a beating heart in the garden of 
my childhood. 

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel 
thrills of the same potency as those that ran 
through me at that moment. First of all I was 
trespassing, which is in itself thrilling; but how 
much more thrilling when you are trespassing on 
what might just as well have been your own 
ground, on what actually was for years your own 
ground, and when you are in deadly peril of see¬ 
ing the rightful owners, whom you have never 
met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear 
round the corner, and of hearing them remark 
with an inquiring and awful politeness ‘‘ I do not 
think I have the pleasure — ” Then the place 
was unchanged. I was standing in the same 
mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had 
always been just there; they curled away on 


72 


ELIZABETH AND 


either side among the shrubs, with the brown 
tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of their 
green stains, just as they did in my day. The 
overgrown lilac bushes still met above my head. 
The moisture dripped from the same ledge in the 
wall on to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had 
done all through the afternoons of all those past 
Novembers. This was the place, this damp and 
gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me. 
Nobody ever came to it, for in winter it was too 
dreary, and in summer so full of mosquitoes that 
only a Backfisch indifferent to spots could have 
borne it. But it was a place where I could play 
unobserved, and where I could walk up and down 
uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the 
air. There was an unwholesome little arbour in 
one dark corner, much frequented by the larger 
black slug, where 1 used to pass glorious after¬ 
noons making plans. I was for ever making 
plans, and if nothing came of them, what did 
it matter ? The mere making had been a joy. 
To me this out-of-the-way corner was always a 
wonderful and a mysterious place, where my 
castles in the air stood close together in radiant 
rows, and where the strangest and most splen¬ 
did adventures befell me; for the hours I passed 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


73 


in it and the people I met in it were all en¬ 
chanted. 

Standing there and looking round with happy 
eyes, I forgot the existence of the cousins. I 
could have cried for joy at being there again. It 
was the home of my fathers, the home that would 
have been mine if I had been a boy, the home 
that was mine now by a thousand tender and 
happy and miserable associations, of which the 
people in possession could not dream. They 
were tenants, but it was my home. I threw my 
arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every 
branch of which I remembered, for had I not 
climbed it, and fallen from it, and torn and 
bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of 
times ? and I gave it such a hearty kiss that my 
nose and chin were smudged into one green stain, 
and still I did not care. Far from caring, it filled 
me with a reckless. Backfisch pleasure in being 
dirty, a delicious feeling that I had not had for 
years. Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk 
the contents of the magic bottle, could not have 
grown smaller more suddenly than I grew younger 
the moment I passed through that magic door. 
Bad habits cling to us, however, with such persis¬ 
tency that I did mechanically pull out my handker- 


74 


ELIZABETH AND 


chief and begin to rub off the welcoming smudge, 
a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in 
the glorious old days; but an artful scent of vio¬ 
lets clinging to the handkerchief brought me to 
my senses, and with a sudden impulse of scorn, 
the fine scorn for scent of every honest Backfisch^ 
I rolled it up into a ball and flung it away into 
the bushes, where I daresay it is at this moment. 
“ Away with you,” I cried, “ away with you, sym¬ 
bol of conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to 
a desire to please — away with you, miserable little 
lace-edged rag ! ” And so young had I grown 
within the last few minutes that I did not even 
feel silly. 

As a Backfisch I had never used handkerchiefs 
— the child of nature scorns to blow its nose — 
though for decency’s sake my governess insisted 
on giving me a clean one of vast size and stubborn 
texture on Sundays. It was stowed away unfolded 
in the remotest corner of my pocket, where it was 
gradually pressed into a beautiful compactness by 
the other contents, which were knives. After a 
while, I remember, the handkerchief being brought 
to light on Sundays to make room for a successor, 
and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to 
an agreement that it should only be changed 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


75 


on the first and third Sundays in the month, on 
condition that I promised to turn it on the other 
Sundays. My governess said that the outer folds 
became soiled from the mere contact with the other 
things in my pocket, and that visitors might catch 
sight of the soiled side if it was never turned when 
I fished to blow my nose in their presence, and 
that one had no right to give one’s visitors shocks. 

“ But I never do wish-” I began with great 

earnestness. Unsinn^' said my governess, cut¬ 
ting me short. 

After the first thrills of joy at being there again 
had gone, the profound stillness of the dripping 
little shrubbery frightened me. It was so still 
that I was afraid to move; so still, that I could 
count each drop of moisture falling from the ooz¬ 
ing wall; so still, that when I held my breath to 
listen, I was deafened by my own heart-beats. I 
made a step forward in the direction where the 
arbour ought to he, and the rustling and jingling 
of my clothes terrified me into immobility. The 
house was only two hundred yards off, and if 
any one had been about, the noise I had already 
made opening the creaking door and so foolishly 
apostrophising my handkerchief must have been 
noticed. Suppose an inquiring gardener, or a 



76 


ELIZABETH AND 


restless cousin, should presently loom through 
the fog, bearing down upon me ? Suppose 
Fraulein Wundermacher should pounce upon 
me suddenly from behind, coming up noiselessly 
in her galoshes, and shatter my castles with her 
customary triumphant “ Jet’zt halte ich dich aber 
fest r' Why, what was I thinking of? Frau¬ 
lein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, such 
an enemy of day-dreams, such a friend of das 
Praktische^ such a lover of creature comforts, had 
died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by 
others, German sometimes, and sometimes Eng¬ 
lish, and sometimes at intervals French, and they 
too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here 
a solitary ghost. Come, Elizabeth,” said I to 
myself impatiently, ‘^are you actually growing 
sentimental over your governesses ? If you think 
you are a ghost, be glad at least that you are a 
solitary one. Would you like the ghosts of all 
those poor women you tormented to rise up now 
in this gloomy place against you ? And do you 
intend to stand here till you are caught ? ” And 
thus exhorting myself to action, and recognising 
how great was the risk I ran in lingering, I 
started down the little path leading to the arbour 
and the principal part of the garden, going, it is 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


17 


true, on tiptoe, and very much frightened by the 
rustling of my petticoats, but determined to see 
what I had come to see and not to be scared 
away by phantoms. 

How regretfully did I think at that moment 
of the petticoats of my youth, so short, so 
silent, and so woollen! And how convenient 
the canvas shoes were with the india rubber 
soles, for creeping about without making a 
sound! Thanks to them I could always run 
swiftly and unheard into my hiding-places, and 
stay there listening to the garden resounding 
with cries of Elizabeth ! Elizabeth ! Come 
in at once to your lessons! ” Or, at a dif¬ 
ferent period, Ou etes-vous done^ petite sotte?'' 
Or at yet another period, Warte nur^ wenn 
ich dich erst hahe I As the voices came round 
one corner, I whisked in my noiseless clothes 
round the next, and it was only Fraulein Wun- 
dermacher, a person of resource, who dis¬ 
covered that all she needed for my successful 
circumvention was galoshes. She purchased a 
pair, wasted no breath calling me, and would 
come up silently, as I stood lapped in a false 
security lost in the contemplation of a squirrel 
or a robin, and seize me by the shoulders from 


78 


ELIZABETH AND 


behind, to the grievous unhinging of my nerves. 
Stealing along in the fog, I looked back uneasily 
once or twice, so vivid was this disquieting mem¬ 
ory, and could hardly be reassured by putting up 
my hand to the elaborate twists and curls that 
compose what my maid calls my Frisur^ and that 
mark the gulf lying between the present and the 
past; for it had happened once or twice, awful 
to relate and to remember, that Fraulein Wun- 
dermacher, sooner than let me slip through her 
fingers, had actually caught me by the long plait 
of hair to whose other end I was attached and 
whose English name I had been told was pigtail, 
just at the instant when I was springing away 
from her into the bushes; and so had led me 
home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope 
of hair, and muttering with a broad smile of 
special satisfaction, Diesmal wirst du mir aber 
nlcht entschlupfen !Fraulein Wundermacher, 
now I came to think of it, must have been a 
humourist. She was certainly a clever and a 
capable woman. But I wished at that moment 
that she would not haunt me so persistently, 
and that I could get rid of the feeling that she 
was just behind in her galoshes, with her hand 
stretched out to seize me. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


79 


Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp 
recesses, I started back with my heart in my 
mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern 
eyes shining in the darkness. It was evident 
that my anxiety lest the cousins should catch 
me had quite upset my nerves, for I am not by 
nature inclined to see eyes where eyes are not. 
‘‘ Don’t be foolish, Elizabeth,” murmured my 
soul in rather a faint voice, go in, and make 
sure.” But I don’t like going in and making 
sure,” I replied. I did go in, however, with a 
sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the 
eyes vanished. What I should have done if 
they had not I am altogether unable to imagine. 
Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime 
and fear at night, but I think if I were to meet 
one I should die. The arbour had fallen into 
great decay, and was in the last stage of mouldi¬ 
ness. My grandfather had had it made, and, 
like other buildings, it enjoyed a period of pros¬ 
perity before being left to the ravages of slugs 
and children, when he came down every after¬ 
noon in summer and drank his coffee there and 
read his Kreuzzeitung and dozed, while the rest 
of us went about on tiptoe, and only the birds 
dared sing. Even the mosquitoes that infested 


8 o 


ELIZABETH AND 


the place were too much in awe of him to sting 
him; they certainly never did sting him, and I 
naturally concluded it must be because he had for¬ 
bidden such familiarities. Although I had played 
there for so many years since his death, my 
memory skipped them all, and went back to the 
days when it was exclusively his. Standing on 
the spot where his armchair used to be, I felt 
how well I knew him now from the impressions 
he made then on my child’s mind, though I was 
not conscious of them for more than twenty 
years. Nobody told me about him, and he died 
when I was six, and yet within the last year or 
two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance 
that comes to us in the leisured times when the 
children have been born and we have time to 
think, has made me know him perfectly well. 
It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the 
grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of 
a salutary and restraining nature, that though 
children may not understand what is said and 
done before them, and have no interest in it at 
the time, and though they may forget it at once 
and for years, yet these things that they have 
seen and heard and not noticed have after all 
impressed themselves for ever on their minds. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


8 i 


and when they are men and women come crowd¬ 
ing back with surprising and often painful dis¬ 
tinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little 
illusions in flocks. 

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. 
He never petted, and he often frowned, and such 
people are generally reverenced. Besides, he was 
a just man, everybody said; a just man who 
might have been a great man if he had chosen, 
and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly glory. 
That he had not so chosen was held to be a con¬ 
vincing proof of his greatness; for he was plainly 
too great to be great in the vulgar sense, and 
shrouded himself in the dignity of privacy and 
potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and 
he still did nothing, was the belief of the simple 
people around. People must believe in some¬ 
body, and having pinned their faith on my 
grandfather in the promising years that lie round 
thirty, it was more convenient to let it remain 
there. He pervaded our family life till my sixth 
year, and saw to it that we all behaved ourselves, 
and then he died, and we were glad that he 
should be in heaven. He was a good German 
(and when Germans are good they are very good) 
who kept the commandments, voted for the Gov- 


82 


ELIZABETH AND 


ernment, grew prize potatoes and bred innumer¬ 
able sheep, drove to Berlin once a year with the 
wool in a procession of waggons behind him and 
sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly 
for a few days there, and then carried most of 
the proceeds home, hunted as often as possible, 
helped his friends, punished his children, read his 
Bible, said his prayers, and was genuinely aston¬ 
ished when his wife had the affectation to die of 
a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain this 
conduct. She ought, of course, to have been 
happy in the possession of so good a man; but 
good men are sometimes oppressive, and to have 
one in the house with you and to live in the 
daily glare of his goodness must be a tremendous 
business. After bearing him seven sons and three 
daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the 
way described, and afforded, said my grandfather, 
another and a very curious proof of the impossi¬ 
bility of ever being sure of your ground with 
women. The incident faded more quickly from 
his mind than it might otherwise have done for 
its having occurred simultaneously with the pro¬ 
duction of a new kind of potato, of which he was 
justly proud. He called it Trost in Trauer^ and 
quoted the text of Scripture Auge um Auge^ Zahn 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


83 


um Zahn^ after which he did not again allude to 
his wife’s decease. In his last years, when my 
father managed the estate, and he only lived with 
us and criticised, he came to have the reputation 
of an oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons 
at the beginning of any important phase in their 
lives, and he received them in this very arbour, 
administering eloquent and minute advice in the 
deep voice that rolled round the shrubbery and 
filled me with a vague sense of guilt as I played. 
Sitting among the bushes playing muffled games 
for fear of disturbing him, I supposed he must be 
reading aloud, so unbroken was the monotony of 
that majestic roll. The young men used to come 
out again bathed in perspiration, much stung by 
mosquitoes, and looking bewildered ; and when 
they had got over the impression made by my 
grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt for¬ 
got all he had said with wholesome quickness, 
and set themselves to the interesting and neces¬ 
sary work of gaining their own experience. Once, 
indeed, a dreadful thing happened, whose imme¬ 
diate consequence was the abrupt end to the long 
and close friendship between us and our nearest 
neighbour. His son was brought to the arbour 
and left there in the usual way, and either he 


84 


ELIZABETH AND 


must have happened on the critical half hour 
after the coffee and before the Kreuzzeitung^ when 
my grandfather was accustomed to sleep, or he 
was more courageous than the others and tried to 
talk, for very shortly, playing as usual near at 
hand, I heard my grandfather’s voice, raised to 
an extent that made me stop in my game and 
quake, saying with deliberate anger, Hebe dich 
weg von mir, Sobn des Satans! ” Which was 
all the advice this particular young man got, and 
which he hastened to take, for out he came 
through the bushes, and though his face was very 
pale, there was an odd twist about the corners of 
his mouth that reassured me. 

This must have happened quite at the end of 
my grandfather’s life, for almost immediately 
afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before 
he need have done because he would eat crab, a 
dish that never agreed with him, in the face of his 
doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely 
die. “What! am I to be conquered by crabs?” 
he demanded indignantly of the doctor; for apart 
from loving them with all his heart he had never 
yet been conquered by anything. “ Nay, sir, the 
combat is too unequal — do not, I pray you, try 
it again,” replied the doctor. But my grand- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


85 


father ordered crabs that very night for supper, 
and went in to table with the shining eyes of one 
who is determined to conquer or die, and the 
crabs conquered, and he died. “ He was a just 
man,’' said the neighbours, except that nearest 
neighbour, formerly his best friend, and might 
have been a great one had he so chosen.” And 
they buried him with profound respect, and the 
sunshine came into our home life with a burst, 
and the birds were not the only creatures that 
sang, and the arbour, from having been a temple 
of Delphic utterances, sank into a home for slugs. 

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the 
invariable ultimate triumph of the insignificant 
and small over the important and vast, illustrated 
in this instance by the easy substitution in the 
arbour of slugs for grandfathers, 1 went slowly 
round the next bend of the path, and came to the 
broad walk along the south side of the high wall 
dividing the flower garden from the kitchen gar¬ 
den, in which sheltered position my father had 
had his choicest flowers. Here the cousins had 
been at work, and all the climbing roses that 
clothed the wall with beauty were gone, and some 
very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up at proper 


86 


ELIZABETH AND 


intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the 
cousins knew the value of this warm aspect, for 
in the border beneath, filled in my father’s time 
in this month of November with the wallflowers 
that were to perfume the walk in spring, there 
was a thick crop of — I stooped down close to 
make sure — yes, a thick crop of radishes. My 
eyes filled with tears at the sight of those radishes, 
and it is probably the only occasion on record on 
which radishes have made anybody cry. My 
dear father, whom I so passionately loved, had in 
his turn passionately loved this particular border, 
and spent the spare moments of a busy life enjoy¬ 
ing the flowers that grew in it. He had no time 
himself for a more near acquaintance with the 
delights of gardening than directing what plants 
were to be used, but found rest from his daily 
work strolling up and down here, or sitting smok¬ 
ing as close to the flowers as possible. “It is the 
Purest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest 
Refreshment to the Spirits of Man,” he would 
quote (for he read other things besides the Kreuz- 
zeitung)^ looking round with satisfaction on reach¬ 
ing this fragrant haven after a hot day in the 
fields. Well, the cousins did not think so. Less 
fanciful, and more sensible as they probably would 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


87 


have said, their position plainly was that you can¬ 
not eat flowers. Their spirits required no refresh¬ 
ment, but their bodies needed much, and therefore 
radishes were more precious than wallflowers. Nor 
was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but 
they were grown in the decent obscurity of odd 
kitchen garden corners and old cucumber frames, 
and would never have been allowed to come 
among the flowers. And only because I was 
not a boy here they were profaning the ground 
that used to be so beautiful. Oh, it was a terrible 
misfortune not to have been a boy ! And how 
sad and lonely it was, after all, in this ghostly 
garden. The radish bed and what it symbolised 
had turned my first joy into grief. This walk 
and border me too much of my father reminded, 
and of all he had been to me. What I knew of 
good he had taught me, and what I had of happi¬ 
ness was through him. Only once during all the 
years we lived together had we been of different 
opinions and fallen out, and it was the one time 
I ever saw him severe. I was four years old, 
and demanded one Sunday to be taken to church. 
My father said no, for I had never been to 
church, and the German service is long and ex¬ 
hausting. I implored. He again said no. I 


88 


ELIZABETH AND 


implored again, and showed such a pious dispo¬ 
sition, and so earnest a determination to behave 
well, that he gave in, and we went off very hap¬ 
pily hand in hand. Now mind, Elizabeth,” he 
said, turning to me at the church door, ‘‘there is 
no coming out again in the middle. Having 
insisted on being brought, thou shalt now sit 
patiently till the end.” “ Oh, yes, oh, yes,” I 
promised eagerly, and went in filled with holy 
fire. The shortness of my legs, hanging help¬ 
lessly for two hours midway between the seat and 
the floor, was the weapon chosen by Satan for my 
destruction. In German churches you do not 
kneel, and seldom stand, but sit nearly the whole 
time, praying and singing in great comfort. If 
you are four years old, however, this unchanged 
position soon becomes one of torture. Unknown 
and dreadful things go on in your legs, strange 
prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, 
a sudden terrifying numbness, when you think 
they must have dropped off but are afraid to look, 
then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and 
burnings. I thought I must be very ill, for I 
had never known my legs like that before. My 
father sitting beside me was engrossed in the 
singing of a chorale that evidently had no end, 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


89 


each verse finished with a long-drawn-out halle¬ 
lujah, after which the organ played by itself for a 
hundred years—by the organist’s watch, which was 
wrong, two minutes exactly — and then another 
verse began. My father, being the patron of the 
living, was careful to sing and pray and listen 
to the sermon with exemplary attention, aware 
that every eye in the little church was on our 
pew, and at first I tried to imitate him; but the 
behaviour of my legs became so alarming that 
after vainly casting imploring glances at him and 
seeing that he continued his singing unmoved, I 
put out my hand and pulled his sleeve. 

‘‘ Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with delibera¬ 
tion ; continuing in a low voice without changing 
the expression of his face, his lips hardly moving, 
and his eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till 
the organist, who was also the postman, should 
have finished his solo, ‘‘ Did I not tell thee to sit 
still, Elizabeth ? ” 

‘‘Yes, but-” 

“Then do it.” 

“ But I want to go home.” 

“ Unsinn^ And the next verse beginning, my 
father sang louder than ever. What could I do ? 
Should I cry ? I began to be afraid I was going 



90 


ELIZABETH AND 


to die on that chair, so extraordinary were the 
sensations in my legs. What could my father do 
to me if I did cryWith the quick instinct of 
small children I felt that he could not put me in 
the corner in church, nor would he whip me in 
public, and that with the whole village looking 
on, he was helpless, and would have to give in. 
Therefore I tugged his sleeve again and more 
peremptorily, and prepared to demand my imme¬ 
diate removal in a loud voice. But my father 
was ready for me. Without interrupting his 
singing, or altering his devout expression, he put 
his hand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch 
— not a playful pinch, but a good hard unmis- 
takeable pinch, such as I had never imagined pos¬ 
sible, and then went on serenely to the next 
hallelujah. For a moment I was petrified with 
astonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my 
playmate, adorer, and friend ^ Smarting with 
pain, for I was a round baby, with a nicely 
stretched, tight skin, and dreadfully hurt in my 
feelings, I opened my mouth to shriek in earnest, 
when my father’s clear whisper fell on my ear, 
each word distinct and not to be misunderstood, 
his eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, 
and his lips hardly moving, Elizabeth^ wenn 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


91 


du schreisty kneife ich dich bis du platztT And 
he finished the verse with unruffled decorum — 

‘‘Will Satan mich verschlingen, 

So lass die Engel singen 

Hallelujah! ” 

We never had another difference. Up to 
then he had been my willing slave, and after 
that I was his. 

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the 
border and its memories to the door in the wall 
leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of 
which my own little garden used to be. The 
door was open, and I stood still a moment be¬ 
fore going through, to hold my breath and listen. 
The silence was as profound as before. The 
place seemed deserted; and I should have 
thought the house empty and shut up but for 
the carefully tended radishes and the recent foot¬ 
marks on the green of the path. They were 
the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down 
to examine a specially clear one, when the loud 
caw of a very bored looking crow sitting on the 
wall just above my head made me jump as I 
have seldom in my life jumped, and reminded 
me that 1 was trespassing. Clearly my nerves 


92 


ELIZABETH AND 


were all to pieces, for I gathered up my skirts 
and fled through the door as though a whole 
army of ghosts and cousins were at my heels, 
nor did I stop till I had reached the remote 
corner where my garden was. “Are you enjoy¬ 
ing yourself, Elizabeth ? ” asked the mocking 
sprite that calls itself my soul: but I was too 
much out of breath to answer. 

This was really a very safe corner. It was 
separated from the main garden and the house 
by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an 
orchard, and it was to the last degree unlikely 
that any one would come there on such an after¬ 
noon. This plot of ground, turned now as I 
saw into a rockery, had been the scene of my 
most untiring labours. Into the cold earth of 
this north border on which the sun never shone 
I had dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket 
money had been spent on it, and as bulbs were 
dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal 
hour I had borrowed from Fraulein Wunder- 
macher, selling her my independence, passing 
utterly into her power, forced as a result till my 
next birthday should come round to an unnatural 
suavity of speech and manner in her company, 
against which my very soul revolted. And after”^ 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


93 


all, nothing came up. The labour of digging 
and watering, the anxious zeal with which I 
pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening 
books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat 
in the middle gazing admiringly an4 with the 
eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be 
gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless 
expenditure of pfennings^ the humiliation of my 
position in regard to Fraulein Wundermacher,— 
all, all had been in vain. No sun shone there, 
and nothing grew. The gardener who reigned 
supreme in those days had given me this big 
piece for that sole reason, because he could do 
nothing with it himself. He was no doubt of 
opinion that it was quite good enough for a child 
to experiment upon, and went his way, when I 
had thanked him with a profuseness of gratitude 
I still remember, with an unmoved countenance. 
For more than a year I worked and waited, and 
watched the career of the flourishing orchard 
opposite with puzzled feelings. The orchard 
was only a few yards away, and yet, although 
my garden was full of manure, and water, and 
attentions that were never bestowed on the 
orchard, all it could show and ever did show 
were a few unhappy beginnings of growth that 


94 


ELIZABETH AND 


either remained stationary and did not achieve 
flowers, or dwindled down again and vanished. 
Once I timidly asked the gardener if he could 
explain these signs and wonders, but he was a 
busy man with no time for answering questions, 
and told me shortly that gardening was not 
learned in a day. How well I remember that 
afternoon, and the very shape of the lazy clouds, 
and the smell of spring things, and myself going 
away abashed and sitting on the shaky bench in 
my domain and wondering for the hundredth 
time what it was that made the difference be¬ 
tween my bit and the bit of orchard in front of 
me. The fruit trees, far enough away from the 
wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade, 
were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sun¬ 
shine in a carelessly well-satisfied fashion that 
filled my heart with envy. There was a rise in 
the field behind them, and at the foot of its pro¬ 
tecting slope they luxuriated in the insolent glory 
of their white and pink perfection. It was May, 
and my heart bled at the thought of the tulips 
I had put in in November, and that I had never 
seen since. The whole of the rest of the garden 
was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other 
side of the wall, were rows and rows of them, — 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


95 


cups of translucent loveliness, a jewelled ring 
flung right round the lawn. But what was there 
not on the other side of that wall? Things came 
up there and grew and flowered exactly as my gar¬ 
dening books said they should do; and in front 
of me, in the gay orchard, things that nobody 
ever troubled about or cultivated or noticed 
throve joyously beneath the trees, — daffodils 
thrusting their spears through the grass, crocuses 
peeping out inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering 
their small cold faces when the first shivering 
spring days came. Only my piece that I so 
loved was perpetually ugly and empty. And I 
sat in it thinking of these things on that radiant 
day, and wept aloud. 

Then an apprentice came by, a youth who 
had often seen me busily digging, and noticing 
the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the 
difference between my garden and the profusion 
of splendour all around, paused with his barrow 
on the path in front of me, and remarked that 
nobody could expect to get blood out of a stone. 
The apparent irrelevance of this statement made 
me weep still louder, the bitter tears of insulted 
sorrow ; but he stuck to his point, and harangued 
me from the path, explaining the connection 


96 


ELIZABETH AND 


between north walls and tulips and blood and 
stones till my tears all dried up again and I 
listened attentively, for the conclusion to be 
drawn from his remarks was plainly that I had 
been shamefully taken in by the head gardener, 
who was an unprincipled person thenceforward to 
be for ever mistrusted and shunned. Standing 
on the path from which the kindly apprentice had 
expounded his proverb, this scene rose before me 
as clearly as though it had taken place that very 
day; but how different everything looked, and 
how it had shrunk ! Was this the wide orchard 
that had seemed to stretch away, it and the 
sloping field beyond, up to the gates of heaven ? 
I believe nearly every child who is much alone 
goes through a certain time of hourly expecting 
the Day of Judgment, and I had made up my 
mind that on that Day the heavenly host would 
enter the world by that very field, coming down 
the slope in shining ranks, treading the daffodils 
under foot, filling the orchard with their songs 
of exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep 
from among the goats. Of course I was a sheep, 
and my governess and the head gardener goats, 
so that the results could not fail to be in every 
way satisfactory. But looking up at the slope 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


97 


and remembering my visions, I laughed at the 
smallness of the field I had supposed would 
hold all heaven. 

Here again the cousins had been at work. 
The site of my garden was occupied by a rockery, 
and the orchard grass with all its treasures had 
been dug up, and the spaces between the trees 
planted with currant bushes and celery in admi¬ 
rable rows ; so that no future little cousins will 
be able to dream of celestial hosts coming towards 
them across the fields of daffodils, and will per¬ 
haps be the better for being free from visions of 
the kind, for as I grew older, uncomfortable 
doubts laid hold of my heart with cold fingers, 
dim uncertainties as to the exact ultimate position 
of the gardener and the governess, anxious ques¬ 
tionings as to how it would be if it were they 
who turned out after all to be sheep, and I 
who- ^ For that we all three might be gath¬ 

ered into the same fold at the last never, in those 
days, struck me as possible, and if it had I should 
not have liked it. 

Now what sort of person can that be,’' I 
asked myself, shaking my head, as I contem¬ 
plated the changes before me, ‘‘ who could put 



98 


ELIZABETH AND 


a rockery among vegetables and currant bushes P 
A rockery, of all things in the gardening world, 
needs consummate tact in its treatment. It is 
easier to make mistakes in forming a rockery 
than in any other garden scheme. Either it is 
a great success, or it is great failure; either it 
is very charming, or it is very absurd. There 
is no state between the sublime and the ridiculous 
possible in a rockery.’’ I stood shaking my head 
disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in 
these reflections, when a sudden quick pattering of 
feet coming along in a great hurry made me turn 
round with a start, just in time to receive the 
shock of a body tumbling out of the mist and 
knocking violently against me. 

It was a little girl of about twelve years 
old. 

Hullo ! ” said the little girl in excellent Eng¬ 
lish ; and then we stared at each other in astonish¬ 
ment. 

I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the 
little girl, offering no apology for having nearly 
knocked me down. “ Who are you ? ” 

“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, 
my eyes fixed on the little girl’s face, and a host 
of memories stirring within me. “ Why, didn’t she 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


99 


marry a missionary, and go out to some place 
where they ate him P ” 

The little girl stared harder. Ate him ? 
Marry P What, has she been married all this 
time to somebody who's been eaten and never let 
on P Oh, I say, what a game ! " And she threw 
back her head and laughed till the garden rang 
again. 

O hush, you dreadful little girl!" I im¬ 
plored, catching her by the arm, and terrified 
beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. 
‘‘ Don’t make that horrid noise — we are certain 
to be caught if you don’t stop-” 

The little girl broke off a shriek of laughter in 
the middle and shut her mouth with a snap. Her 
eyes, round and black and shiny like boot buttons, 
came still further out of her head. Caught P” 
she said eagerly. What, are you afraid of being 
caught too P Well, this is a game ! ” And with 
her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her coat 
she capered in front of me in the excess of her en¬ 
joyment, reminding me of a very fat black lamb 
frisking round the dazed and passive sheep its 
mother. 

It was clear that the time had come for me to 
get down to the gate at the end of the garden as 



100 


ELIZABETH AND 


quickly as possible, and I began to move away in 
that direction. The little girl at once stopped 
capering and planted herself squarely in front of 
me. ‘‘ Who are you ? ” she said, examining me 
from my hat to my boots with the keenest 
interest. 

I considered this ungarnished manner of asking 
questions impertinent, and, trying to look lofty, 
made an attempt to pass at the side. 

The little girl, with a quick, cork-like move¬ 
ment, was there before me. 

“Who are you ? ” she repeated, her expression 
friendly but firm. 

“ Oh, I — Tm a pilgrim,’' I said in desperation. 

“ A pilgrim! ” echoed the little girl. She 
seemed struck, and while she was struck I slipped 
past her and began to walk quickly towards the 
door in the wall. “ A pilgrim ! ” said the little 
girl, again, keeping close beside me, and looking 
me up and down attentively. “ I don’t like pil¬ 
grims. Aren’t they people who are always walk¬ 
ing about, and have things the matter with their 
feet ? Have you got anything the matter with 
your feet ? ” 

“ Certainly not,” I replied indignantly, walking 
still faster. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


lOI 


And they never wash, Miss Robinson says. 
You don’t either, do you ? ” 

^^Not wash? Oh, I’m afraid you are a very 
badly brought-up little girl — oh, leave me alone 
— I must run-” 

So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, 
“ for Miss Robinson must be close behind us. 
She nearly had me just before I found you.” 
And she started running by my side. 

The thought of Miss Robinson close behind 
us gave wings to my feet, and, casting my dig¬ 
nity, of which, indeed, there was but little left, to 
the winds, I fairly flew down the path. The little 
girl was not to be outrun, and though she panted 
and turned weird colours, kept by my side and 
even talked. Oh, I was tired, tired in body and 
mind, tired by the different shocks I had received, 
tired by the journey, tired by the want of food; 
and here I was being forced to run because this 
very naughty little girl chose to hide instead of 
going in to her lessons. 

“ I say — this is jolly-” she jerked 

out. 

“ But why need we run to the same place ? ” 
I breathlessly asked, in the vain hope of getting 
rid of her. 




102 


ELIZABETH AND 


“Oh, yes — that’s just—the fun. We’d get 
on — together — you and I-” 

“ No, no,” said I, decided on this point, be¬ 
wildered though I was. 

“ I can’t stand washing — either — it’s awful 
— in winter — and makes one have — chaps.” 

“ But I don’t mind it in the least,” I protested 
faintly, not having any energy left. 

“ Oh, I say ! ” said the little girl, looking at 
my face, and making the sound known as a guf¬ 
faw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly 
revolting. 

We had got safely through the door, round 
the corner past the radishes, and were in the 
shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy 
it was to hide in the tangle of little paths, and 
stopped a moment to look round and listen. 
The little girl opened her mouth to speak. 
With great presence of mind I instantly put my 
muff in front of it and held it there tight, while 
I listened. Dead silence, except for the laboured 
breathing and struggles of the little girl. 

“ I don’t hear a sound,” I whispered, letting 
her go again. “ Now what did you want to 
say ? ” I added, eyeing her severely. 

“ I wanted to say,” she panted, “ that it’s no 



HER GERMAN GARDEN 


103 


good pretending you wash with a nose like 
that.” 

“ A nose like that! A nose like what ? ” I 
exclaimed, greatly offended; and though I put 
up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt 
it, I could find no difference in it. ‘‘ I am afraid 
poor Miss Robinson must have a wretched life,” 
I said, in tones of deep disgust. 

The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I 
were paying her compliments. ‘‘ It’s all green 
and brown,” she said, pointing. Is it always 
like that ? ” 

Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the 
gate, and the enraptured kiss it had received, 
and blushed. 

“Won’t it come off.^ ” persisted the little girl. 

“ Of course it will come off,” I answered, 
frowning. 

“ Why don’t you rub it off? ” 

Then I remembered the throwing away of the 
handkerchief, and blushed again. 

“ Please lend me your handkerchief,” I said 
humbly, “I — I have lost mine.” 

There was a great fumbling in six different 
pockets, and then a handkerchief that made me 
young again merely to look at it was produced. 


104 


ELIZABETH AND 


I took it thankfully and rubbed with energy, the 
little girl, intensely interested, watching the 
operation and giving me advice. There — it’s 
all right now — a little more on the right — 
there — now it’s all off.” 

“ Are you sure ? No green left ^ ” I anxiously 
asked. 

No, it’s red all over now,” she replied cheer¬ 
fully. ‘‘ Let me get home,” thought I, very 
much upset by this information, ‘‘let me get 
home to my dear, uncritical, admiring babies, 
who accept my nose as an example of what a 
nose should be, and whatever its colour think 
it beautiful.” And thrusting the handkerchief 
back into the little girl’s hands, I hurried away 
down the path. She packed it away hastily, but 
it took some seconds for it was of the size of a 
small sheet, and then came running after me. 
“ Where are you going ? ” she asked surprised, 
as I turned down the path leading to the 
gate. 

“Through this gate,” I replied with decision. 

“But you mustn’t — we’re not allowed to go 
through there-” 

So strong was the force of old habits in that 
place that at the words not allowed my hand 



HER GERMAN GARDEN 


105 


dropped of itself from the latch; and at that 
instant a voice calling quite close to us through 
the mist struck me rigid. 

“ Elizabeth ! Elizabeth ! called the voice, 
‘‘ Come in at once to your lessons — Elizabeth 1 
Elizabeth ! ” 

‘‘ It’s Miss Robinson,” whispered the little 
girl, twinkling with excitement; then, catching 
sight of my face, she said once more with eager 
insistence, Who are you ? ” 

‘‘ Oh, I’m a ghost! ” I cried with conviction, 
pressing my hands to my forehead and looking 
round fearfully. 

“ Pooh,” said the little girl. 

It was the last remark I heard her make, for 
there was a creaking of approaching boots in the 
bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I pulled 
the gate open with one desperate pull, flung it 
to behind me, and fled out and away down the 
wide, misty fields. 


The Gotha Almanach says that the reigning 
cousin married the daughter of a Mr. Johnstone, 
an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their 
only child was born, Elizabeth. 


io6 


ELIZABETH AND 


November lOth. — Last night we had ten de¬ 
grees of frost (Fahrenheit), and I went out the 
first thing this morning to see what had become 
of the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide 
awake and quite cheerful — covered with rime it 
is true, but anything but black and shrivelled. 
Even those in boxes on each side of the veran-- 
dah steps were perfectly alive and full of buds, 
and one in particular, a Bouquet d’Or, is a mass 
of buds, and would flower if it could get the 
least encouragement. I am beginning to think 
that the tenderness of tea-roses is much exag¬ 
gerated, and am certainly very glad I had the 
courage to try them in this northern garden. 
But I must not fly too boldly in the face of Prov¬ 
idence, and have ordered those in the boxes to 
be taken into the greenhouse for the winter, and 
hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a sunny place near the 
glass, may be induced to open some of those 
buds. The greenhouse is only used as a refuge, 
and kept at a temperature just above freezing, and 
is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot stand 
the very coldest part of the winter out of doors. 
I don't use it for growing anything, because I 
don't love things that will only bear the garden 
for three or four months in the year and require 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


107 


coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me 
a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to 
stand roughness and cold without dismally giving 
in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of 
constitution is pretty, either in plants or women. 
No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be 
had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for 
each of these there are fifty others still lovelier 
that will gratefully grow in God’s wholesome air 
and are blessed in return with a far greater inten¬ 
sity of scent and colour. 

We have been very busy till now getting the 
permanent beds into order and planting the new 
tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next sumi- 
mer with more hope than ever in spite of my 
many failures. I wish the years would pass 
quickly that will bring my garden to perfection ! 
The Persian Yellows have gone into their new 
quarters, and their place is occupied by the tea- 
rose Safrano; all the rose beds are carpeted with 
pansies sown in July and transplanted in October, 
each bed having a separate colour. The purple 
ones are the most charming and go well with 
every rose, but I have white ones with Laurette 
Messimy, and yellow ones with Safrano, and a 
new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses. 


io8 


ELIZABETH AND 


Round the semicircle on the south side of the 
little privet hedge two rows of annual larkspurs 
in all their delicate shades have been sown, and 
just beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semi¬ 
circle of standard tea and pillar roses. In front 
of the house the long borders have been stocked 
with larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, 
giant poppies, pinks. Madonna lilies, wallflowers, 
hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lavender, 
starworts, cornflowers. Lychnis chalcedonica, and 
bulbs packed in wherever bulbs could go. These 
are the borders that were so hardly used by the 
other gardener. The spring boxes for the veran¬ 
dah steps have been filled with pink and white 
and yellow tulips. I love tulips better than any 
other spring flower; they are the embodiment of 
alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a 
hyacinth look like a wholesome, freshly tubbed 
young girl beside a stout lady whose every move¬ 
ment weighs down the air with patchouli. Their 
faint, delicate scent is refinement itself; and is 
there anything in the world more charming than 
the sprightly way they hold up their little faces 
to the sun ? I have heard them called bold and 
flaunting, but to me they seem modest grace 
itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


109 

much as they can and not afraid of looking the 
sun or anything else above them in the face. On 
the grass there are two beds of them carpeted with 
forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered 
groups, are daffodils and narcissus. Down the 
wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins 
will (I hope) shine majestic; and one cool corner, 
backed by a group of firs, is graced by Madonna 
lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines. In a dis¬ 
tant glade I have made a spring garden round an 
oak tree that stands alone in the sun — groups of 
crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, hyacinths, and tulips, 
among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus 
Malus spectabilis, floribunda, and coronaria; 
Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb, serotina, triloba, and 
Pissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every colour, 
and several kinds of Crataegus and other May 
lovelinesses. If the weather behaves itself nicely, 
and we get gentle rains in due season, I think this 
little corner will be beautiful — but what a big 
“ if” it is ! Drought is our great enemy, and 
the two last summers each contained five weeks 
of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches 
dried up and the soil was like hot pastry. At 
such times the watering is naturally quite beyond 
the strength of two men; but as a garden is a 


no 


ELIZABETH AND 


place to be happy in, and not one where you 
want to meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn, 
I should not like to have more than these two, 
or rather one and a half—the assistant having 
stork-like proclivities and going home in the 
autumn to his native Russia, returning in the 
spring with the first warm winds. I want to 
keep him over the winter, as there is much to 
be done even then, and I sounded him on the 
point the other day. He is the most abject- 
looking of human beings — lame, and afflicted 
with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good 
worker and plods along unwearyingly from sun¬ 
rise to dusk. 

Pray, my good stork,'’ said I, or German 
words to that effect, why don't you stay here 
altogether, instead of going home and rioting away 
all you have earned ? " 

would stay," he answered, ‘‘but I have my 
wife there in Russia." 

“Your wife!" I exclaimed, stupidly surprised 
that the poor deformed creature should have found 
a mate — as though there were not a superfluitv 
of mates in the world — “I didn't know you were 
married ?" 

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


III 


don’t know what they would do if I were not to 
come home. But it is a very expensive journey 
to Russia, and costs me every time seven marks.” 

“ Seven marks ! ” 

Yes, it is a great sum.” 

I wondered whether I should be able to get to 
Russia for seven marks, supposing I were to be 
seized with an unnatural craving to go there. 

All the labourers who work here from March 
to December are Russians and Poles, or a mixture 
of both. We send a man over who can speak 
their language, to fetch as many as he can early 
in the year, and they arrive with their bundles, 
men and women and babies, and as soon as they 
have got here and had their fares paid, they dis¬ 
appear in the night if they get the chance, some¬ 
times fifty of them at a time, to go and work 
singly or in couples for the peasants, who pay 
them a pfenning or two more a day than we do, 
and let them eat with the family. From us they 
get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as 
many potatoes as they can eat. The women get 
less, not because they work less, but because they 
are women and must not be encouraged. The 
overseer lives with them, and has a loaded revol¬ 
ver in his pocket and a savage dog at his heels. 


112 


ELIZABETH AND 


For the first week or two after their arrival, the 
foresters and other permanent officials keep guard 
at night over the houses they are put into. I 
suppose they find it sleepy work ; for certain it 
is that spring after spring the same thing hap¬ 
pens, fifty of them getting away in spite of all 
our precautions, and we are left with our mouths 
open and much out of pocket. This spring, by 
some mistake, they arrived without their bundles, 
which had gone astray on the road, and, as they 
travel in their best clothes, they refused utterly 
to work until their luggage came. Nearly a 
week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in 
authority. 

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do 
anything on Saints’ days, and there surely never 
was a church so full of them as the Russian 
Church. In the spring, when every hour is of 
vital importance, the work is constantly being 
interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping 
in the sun the whole day, agreeably conscious that 
they are pleasing themselves and the Church at 
one and the same time —= a state of perfection as 
rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided by Faith 
is of course exasperated at this waste of precious 
time, and I confess that during the first mild days 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


after the long winter frost when it is possible to 
begin to work the ground, I have sympathised 
with the gloom of the Man of Wrath, confronted 
in one week by two or three empty days on which 
no man will labour, and have listened in silence 
to his remarks about distant Russian saints. 

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount 
of civilisation that made me pity these people 
when first I came to live among them. They 
herd together like animals and do the work of 
animals ; but in spite of the armed overseer, the 
dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed 
down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning 
to believe that they would strongly object to soap, 
I am sure they would not wear new clothes, and 
I hear them coming home from their work at 
dusk singing. They are like little children or 
animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea 
of a future; and after all, if you work all day in 
God’s sunshine, when evening comes you are 
pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much 
inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not 
yet persuaded myself, however, that the women 
are happy. They have to work as hard as the 
men and get less for it; they have to produce 
offspring, quite regardless of times and seasons 


ELIZABETH AND 


114 

and the general fitness of things ; tliey have to do 
this as expeditiously as possible, so that they may 
not unduly interrupt the work in hand; nobody 
helps them, notices them, or cares about them, 
least of all the husband. It is quite a usual thing 
to see them working in the fields in the morning, 
and working again in the afternoon, having in the 
interval produced a baby. The baby is left to an 
old woman whose duty it is to look after babies 
collectively. When I expressed my horror at the 
poor creatures working immediately afterwards as 
though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath 
informed me that they did not suffer because they 
had never worn corsets, nor had their mothers and 
grandmothers. We were riding together at the 
time, and had just passed a batch of workers, and 
my husband was speaking to the overseer, when 
a woman arrived alone, and taking up a spade, 
began to dig. She grinned cheerfully at us as she 
made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked that 
she had just been back to the house and had a 
baby. 

“ Poor, poor woman ! ” I cried, as we rode on, 
feeling for some occult reason very angry with the 
Man of Wrath. “ And her wretched husband 
doesn’t care a rap, and will probably beat her 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


115 

to-night if his supper isn’t right. What nonsense 
it is to talk about the equality of the sexes when 
the women have the babies ! ” 

‘‘ Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of 
Wrath, smiling condescendingly. “You have 
got to the very root of the matter. Nature, 
while imposing this agreeable duty on the woman, 
weakens her and disables her for any serious com¬ 
petition with man. How can a person who is 
constantly losing a year of the best part of her life 
compete with a young man who never loses any 
time at all ? He has the brute force, and his 
last word on any subject could always be his fist.” 

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon 
in the beginning of November, and the leaves 
dropped slowly and silently at our horses’ feet as 
we rode towards the Hirschwald. 

“ It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man 
of Wrath, “amongst these Russians, and I believe 
amongst the lower classes everywhere, and cer¬ 
tainly commendable on the score of simplicity, to 
silence a woman’s objections and aspirations by 
knocking her down. I have heard it said that 
this apparently brutal action has anything but the 
maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might 
suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satis- 


ii6 


ELIZABETH AND 


fied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable 
by other and more polite methods. Do you sup¬ 
pose,” he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with 
his whip as we passed, that the intellectual hus¬ 
band, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic 
yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves 
the result aimed at ? He may and does go on 
wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the 
very least convince her of her folly; while his 
brother in the ragged coat has got through the 
whole business in less time than it takes me to 
speak about it. There is no doubt that these 
poor women fulfil their vocation far more thor¬ 
oughly than the women in our class, and, as the 
truest happiness consists in finding one’s vocation 
quickly and continuing in it all one’s days, I con¬ 
sider they are to be envied rather than not, since 
they are early taught, by the impossibility of ar¬ 
gument with marital muscle, the impotence of 
female endeavour and the blessings of content.” 

“ Pray go on,” I said politely. 

“ These women accept their beatings with a 
simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from con¬ 
sidering themselves insulted, admire the strength 
and energy of the man who can administer such 
eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a man 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


117 

beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism 
and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as 
necessary at least once a week, whether she has 
done anything or not, for the sake of her general 
health and happiness.” 

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of 
Wrath rather to gloat over these castigations. 

“ Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my 
whip, “ look at that baby moon so innocently 
peeping at us over the edge of the mist just 
behind that silver birch; and don’t talk so much 
about women and things you don’t understand. 
What is the use of your bothering about fists and 
whips and muscles and all the dreadful things in¬ 
vented for the confusion of obstreperous wives ? 
You know you are a civilised husband, and a civ¬ 
ilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be 
a man.” 

“And a civilised wife ? ” he asked, bringing his 
horse close up beside me and putting his arm 
round my waist, “ has she ceased to be a 
woman ? ” 

“ I should think so indeed, — she is a goddess, 
and can never be worshipped and adored enough.” 

“ It seems to me,” he said, “that the conversa¬ 
tion is growing personal.” 


ii8 


ELIZABETH AND 


I started off at a canter across the short, springy 
turf. The Hirschwald is an enchanted place on 
such an evening, when the mists lie low on the 
turf, and overhead the delicate, bare branches of 
the silver birches stand out clear against the soft 
sky, while the little moon looks down kindly on 
the damp November world. Where the trees 
thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth 
and rotting leaves kicked up by the horses’ hoofs 
fills my soul with delight. I particularly love that 
smell, — it brings before me the entire benevo¬ 
lence of Nature, for ever working death and de¬ 
cay, so piteous in themselves, into the rneans of 
fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours 
as she works. 

December Jth. — I have been to England. I 
went for at least a month and stayed a week 
in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. 
Twice I fled before the fogs into the country 
to see friends with gardens, but it was raining, 
and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had 
in the Fatherland) and the infinite possibilities, 
there was nothing to interest the intelligent and 
garden-loving foreigner, for the good reason that 
you cannot be interested in gardens under an 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


119 

umbrella. So I went back to the fogs, and after 
groping about for a few days more began to long 
inordinately for Germany. A terrific gale sprang 
up after I had started, and the journey both by 
sea and land was full of horrors, the trains in 
Germany being heated to such an extent that it 
is next to impossible to sit still, great gusts of 
hot air coming up under the cushions, the cush¬ 
ions themselves being very hot, and the wretched 
traveller still hotter. 

But when I reached my home and got out of 
the train into the purest, brightest snow-atmos¬ 
phere, the air so still that the whole world seemed 
to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow 
sparkling underfoot and on the trees, and a happy 
row of three beaming babies awaiting me, I was con¬ 
soled for all my torments, only remembering them 
enough to wonder why I had gone away at all. 

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and 
an elegant bouquet of pine needles and grass in 
the other, and what with the due presentation of 
the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, the 
hugging and kissing was much interfered with. 
Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all somehow 
squeezed into the sleigh, and off* we went with 
jingling bells and shrieks of delight 


120 


ELIZABETH AND 


Directly you comes home the fun begins/' 
said the May baby, sitting very close to me. 
“ How the snow purrs ! ” cried the April baby, 
as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. 
The June baby sat loudly singing ‘‘ The King 
of Love my Shepherd is," and swinging her 
kitten round by its tail to emphasise the rhythm. 

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked 
the very abode of peace, and I ran through all 
the rooms, eager to take possession of them 
again, and feeling as though I had been away 
for ever. When I got to the library I came to 
a standstill, — ah, the dear room, what happy 
times I have spent in it rummaging amongst 
the books, making plans for my garden, build¬ 
ing castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing 
nothing! There was a big peat fire blazing half 
up the chimney, and the old housekeeper had 
put pots of flowers about, and on the writing- 
table was a great bunch of violets scenting the 
room. “ Oh, how good it is to be home again ! ” 
I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies clung 
about my knees, looking up at me with eyes full 
of love. Outside the dazzling snow and sun¬ 
shine, inside the bright room and happy faces 
— I thought of those yellow fogs and shivered. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


I 2 I 


The library is not used by the Man of Wrath ; 
it is neutral ground where we meet in the even¬ 
ings for an hour before he disappears into his 
own rooms — a series of very smoky dens in 
the southeast corner of the house. It looks, I 
am afraid, rather too gay for an ideal library; 
and its colouring, white and yellow, is so cheerful 
as to be almost frivolous. There are white book¬ 
cases all round the walls, and there is a great 
fireplace, and four windows, facing full south, 
opening on to my most cherished bit of garden, 
the bit round the sun-dial; so that with so much 
colour and such a big fire and such floods of 
sunshine it has anything but a sober air, in spite 
of the venerable volumes filling the shelves. 
Indeed, I should never be surprised if they 
skipped down from their places, and, picking 
up their leaves, began to dance. 

With this room to live in, I can look forward 
with perfect equanimity to being snowed up 
for any time Providence thinks proper; and 
to go into the garden in its snowed-up state 
is like going into a bath of purity. The first 
breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure 
that it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and 
sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness. 


122 


ELIZABETH AND 


Yesterday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial 
the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so 
many degrees below freezing that it will be 
weeks finding its way up again; but there was 
no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well 
wrapped up in furs. I even had tea brought 
out there, to the astonishment of the menials, 
and sat till long after the sun had set, enjoying 
the frosty air. I had to drink the tea very 
quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to 
begin to freeze. After the sun had gone down 
the rooks came home to their nests in the garden 
with a great fuss and fluttering, and many hesita¬ 
tions and squabbles before they settled on their 
respective trees. They flew over my head in 
hundreds with a mighty swish of wings, and 
when they had arranged themselves comfortably, 
an intense hush fell upon the garden, and the 
house began to look like a Christmas card, with 
its white roof against the clear, pale green of 
the western sky, and lamplight shining in the 
windows. 

I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by 
our parson, in the intervals between looking round 
me and being happy. He came one day with the 
book and begged me to read it, having discovered 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


123 


that my interest in Luther was not as living as it 
ought to be; so 1 took it out with me into the 
garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain 
saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread 
and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, 
is ambrosia eaten under a tree. I read Luther all 
the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances at 
the garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in 
my heart. His struggles with devils amazed me ; 
and I wondered whether such a day as that, full of 
grace and the forgiveness of sins, never struck him 
as something to make him relent even towards 
devils. He apparently never allowed himself just 
to be happy. He was a wonderful man, but I am 
glad I was not his wife. 

Our parson is an interesting person, and un¬ 
tiring in his efforts to improve himself. Both he 
and his wife study whenever they have a spare 
moment, and there is a tradition that she stirs her 
puddings with one hand and holds a Latin gram¬ 
mar in the other, the grammar, of course, getting 
the greater share of her attention. To most Ger¬ 
man Hausfraus the dinners and the puddings are 
of paramount importance, and they pride them¬ 
selves on keeping those parts of their houses that 
are seen in a state of perpetual and spotless per- 


124 


ELIZABETH AND 


fection, and this is exceedingly praiseworthy ; but, 
I would humbly inquire, are there not other 
things even more important ? And is not plain 
living and high thinking better than the other 
way about ? And all too careful making of din¬ 
ners and dusting of furniture takes a terrible 
amount of precious time, and — and with shame I 
confess that my sympathies are all with the pud¬ 
ding and the grammar. It cannot be right to be 
the slave of one’s household gods, and I protest 
that if my furniture ever annoyed me by wanting 
to be dusted when I wanted to be doing some¬ 
thing else, and there was no one to do the dusting 
for me, I would cast it all into the nearest bonfire 
and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great 
contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to 
the very next pedlar who was weak enough to buy 
them. Parsons’ wives have to do the housework 
and cooking themselves, and are thus not only 
cooks and housemaids, but if they have children 
— and they always do have children — they are 
head and under nurse as well; and besides these 
trifling duties have a good deal to do with their 
fruit and vegetable garden, and everything to do 
with their poultry. This being so, is it not 
pathetic to find a young woman bravely strug- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


125 


gling to learn languages and keep up with her 
husband ? If I were that husband, those pud¬ 
dings would taste sweetest to me that were served 
with Latin sauce. They are both severely pious,* 
and are for ever engaged in desperate efforts to 
practise what they preach ; than which, as we all 
know, nothing is more difficult. He works in 
his parish with the most noble self-devotion, and 
never loses courage, although his efforts have 
been several times rewarded by disgusting libels 
pasted up on the street-corners, thrown under 
doors, and even fastened to his own garden wall. 
The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and 
animal, and a sensitive, intellectual parson among 
them is really a pearl before swine. For years he 
has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most liv¬ 
ing faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes 
wonder whether they are any better now in his 
parish than they were under his predecessor, a man 
who smoked and drank beer from Monday morn¬ 
ing to Saturday night, never did a stroke of work, 
and often kept the scanty congregation waiting 
on Sunday afternoons while he finished his post¬ 
prandial nap. It is discouraging enough to make 
most men give in, and leave the parish to get to 
heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems 


126 


ELIZABETH AND 


discouraged, and goes on sacrificing the best part 
of his life to these people when all his tastes are 
literary, and all his inclinations towards the life of 
the student. His convictions drag him out of 
his little home at all hours to minister to the sick 
and exhort the wicked; they give him no rest, 
and never let him feel he has done enough; and 
when he comes home v/eary, after a day’s wrestling 
with his parishioners’ souls, he is confronted on 
his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own 
front door. He never speaks of these things, but 
how shall they be hid ? Everybody here knows 
everything that happens before the day is over, 
and what we have for dinner is of far greater gen¬ 
eral interest than the most astounding political 
earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy cottage, 
and a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. 
His predecessor used to hang out his washing on 
the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person 
entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had 
finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon 
of a most vituperative description, and hurling 
invective at the Man of Wrath, who sat up in his 
box drinking in every word and enjoying himself 
thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, 
and such a sermon had never been heard before. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


127 


It is spoken of in the village to this day with 
bated breath and awful joy. 

December o.'ind. — Up to now we have had a 
beautiful winter. Clear skies, frost, little wind, 
and, except for a sharp touch now and then, very 
few really cold days. My windows are gay with 
hyacinths and lilies of the valley; and though, as 
I have said, I don’t admire the smell of hyacinths 
in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and 
chastity next to that of other flowers, I am glad 
enough now to bury my nose in their heavy sweet¬ 
ness. In December one cannot afford to be fas¬ 
tidious ; besides, one is actually less fastidious 
about everything in the winter. The keen air 
braces soul as well as body into robustness, and 
the food and the perfume disliked in the summer 
are perfectly welcome then. 

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but 
have often locked myself up in a room alone, 
shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the 
flower catalogues and make my lists of seeds and 
shrubs and trees for the spring. It is a fascinat¬ 
ing occupation, and acquires an additional charm 
when you know you ought to be doing something 
else, that Christmas is at the door, that children 


128 


ELIZABETH AND 


and servants and farm hands depend on you for 
their pleasure, and that, if you don’t see to the 
decoration of the trees and house, and the buying 
of the presents, nobody else will. The hours fly 
by shut up with those catalogues and with Duty 
snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t 
like Duty — everything in the least disagreeable 
is always sure to be one’s duty. Why cannot it 
be my duty to make lists and plans for the dear 
garden? ‘‘And so it /V,” I insisted to the Man 
of Wrath, when he protested against what he 
called wasting my time upstairs. “No,” he 
replied sagely; “ your garden is not your duty, 
because it is your Pleasure.” 

What a comfort it is to have such wells of wis¬ 
dom constantly at my disposal! Anybody can 
have a husband, but to few is it given to have a 
sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it 
is. useful. Indeed, in its practical utility the only 
thing 1 ever saw to equal it is a sofa my neighbour 
has bought as a Christmas surprise for her hus¬ 
band, and which she showed me the last time I 
called there — a beautiful invention, as she ex¬ 
plained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a chest 
of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, 
and on top of which you put yourself, and if any- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


129 


body calls in the middle of the night and you 
happen to be using the drawing-room as a bed¬ 
room, you just pop the bedclothes inside, and 
there you are discovered sitting on your sofa and 
looking for all the world as though you had been 
expecting visitors for hours. 

Pray, does he wear pyjamas ? ” I inquired. 

But she had never heard of pyjamas. 

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I 
want to have a border all yellow, every shade of 
yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white, and 
the amount of work and studying of gardening 
books it costs me will only be appreciated by be¬ 
ginners like myself. I have been weeks planning 
it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it to be 
a succession of glories from May till the frosts, 
and the chief feature is to be the number of 
“ardent marigolds” — flowers that I very ten¬ 
derly love — and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums 
are to be of every sort and shade, and are to climb 
and creep and grow in bushes, and show their 
lovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. 
Then there are to be eschscholtzias, dahlias, sun¬ 
flowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, yellow violas, 
yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow lupins — 
everything that is yellow or that has a yellow 


va- 


130 


ELIZABETH AND 


riety. The place I have chosen for it is a long, wide 
border in the sun, at the foot of a grassy slope 
crowned with lilacs and pines, and facing south¬ 
east. You go through a little pine wood, and, 
turning a corner, are to come suddenly upon this 
bit of captured morning glory. I want it to be 
blinding in its brightness after the dark, cool path 
through the wood. 

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when 
I reflect upon the probable difference between the 
idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and the 
gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was 
forcing some tulips, and they have all shrivelled up 
and died, and he says he cannot imagine why. 
Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going 
to marry her after Christmas, and refuses to enter 
into any of my plans with the enthusiasm they 
deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily chop¬ 
ping wood from morning till night to keep the 
beloved one’s kitchen fire well supplied. I can¬ 
not understand any one preferring cooks to mari¬ 
golds ; those future marigolds, shadowy as they 
are, and whose seeds are still sleeping at the seeds¬ 
man’s, have shone through my winter days like 
golden lamps. 

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


course the first thing I should do would be to buy 
a spade and go and garden, and then I should 
have the delight of doing everything for my flow¬ 
ers with my own hands and need not waste time 
explaining what I want done to somebody else. 
It is dull work giving orders and trying to de¬ 
scribe the bright visions of one’s brain to a per¬ 
son who has no visions and no brain, and who 
thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged 
with blue. 

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants 
to put down only those humble ones that are 
easily pleased and grateful for little, for my soil 
is by no means all that it might be, and to most 
plants the climate is rather trying. I feel really 
grateful to any flower that is sturdy and willing 
enough to flourish here. Pansies seem to like 
the place and so do sweet-peas; pinks don’t, and 
after much coaxing gave hardly any flowers last 
summer. Nearly all the roses were a success, in 
spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam, 
which was covered with buds ready to open, when 
they suddenly turned brown and died, and three 
standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and 
simply sulked. I had been very excited about 
Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues being 


132 


ELIZABETH AND 


specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the 
snubbing I got. Never be excited, my dears, 
about anything^' shall be the advice I will give 
the three babies when the time comes to take 
them out to parties, “ or, if you are, don’t show 
it. If by nature you are volcanoes, at least be 
only smouldering ones. Don’t look pleased, 
don’t look interested, don’t, above all things, 
look eager. Calm indifference should be written 
on every feature of your faces. Never show 
that you like any one person, or any one thing. 
Be cool, languid, and reserved. If you don’t do 
as your mother tells you and are just gushing, 
frisky, young idiots, snubs will be your portion. 
If you do as she tells you, you’ll marry princes 
and live happily ever after.” 

Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this 
part of the world the more you are pleased to see 
a person the less is he pleased to see you; 
whereas, if you are disagreeable, he will grow 
pleasant visibly, his countenance expanding into 
wider amiability the more your own is stiff and 
sour. But I was not prepared for that sort of 
thing in a rose, and was disgusted with Dr. Grill. 
He had the best place in the garden — warm, 
sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


133 


with the tenderest care; he was given the most 
dainty mixture of compost, clay, and manure; 
he was watered assiduously all through the 
drought when more willing flowers got nothing; 
and he refused to do anything but look black and 
shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live 
— he just existed; and at the end of the summer 
not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf 
than when he was first put in in April. It would 
have been better if he had died straight away, for 
then I should have known what to do; as it is, 
there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped 
up carefully for the winter, excluding kinder 
roses, and probably intending to repeat the same 
conduct next year. Well, trials are the portion 
of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and 
in any case it is better to be tried by plants than 
persons, seeing that with plants you know that it 
is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it 
is always the other way about — and who is there 
among us who has not felt the pangs of injured 
innocence, and known them to be grievous ? 

I have two visitors staying with me, though I 
have done nothing to provoke such an infliction, 
and had been looking forward to a happy little 
Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the 


134 


ELIZABETH AND 


babies. Fate decreed otherwise. Quite regu¬ 
larly, if I look forward to anything, Fate steps 
in and decrees otherwise; I don’t know why it 
should, but it does. I had not even invited 
these good ladies — like greatness on the modest, 
they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the 
sweet singer of the summer, whom I love as she 
deserves, but of whom I certainly thought I had 
seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote 
and asked if 1 would have her over Christmas, 
as her husband was out of sorts, and she didn’t 
like him in that state. Neither do I like sick 
husbands, so, full of sympathy, I begged her to 
come, and here she is. And the other is 
Minora. 

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, 
for I was not even aware of her existence a 
fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully 
one morning to breakfast — it was the very day 
after my return from England — I found a 
letter from an English friend, who up till then 
had been perfectly innocuous, asking me to be¬ 
friend Minora. I read the letter aloud for the 
benefit of the Man of Wrath, who was eating 
Spickgans, a delicacy much sought after in these 
parts. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


135 

“ Do, my dear Elizabeth/’ wrote my friend, 
‘‘ take some notice of the poor thing. She is 
studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere liter¬ 
ally to go for Christmas. She is very ambitious 

and hardworking-” 

‘‘Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she 
is not pretty. Only ugly girls work hard.’' 

. “ —and she is really very clever-” 

“ I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” 
again interrupted the Man of Wrath. 

“ — and unless some kind creature like your¬ 
self takes pity on her she will be very lonely.” 

“ Then let her be lonely.” 

“ Her mother is my oldest friend, and would 
be greatly distressed to think that her daughter 
should be alone in a foreign town at such a season.” 
“ I do not mind the distress of the mother.” 

“ Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “ I 
shall have to ask her to come! ” 

“ If you should be inclined,” the letter went 
on, “ to play the good Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, 
1 am positive you would find Minora a bright, 

intelligent companion-” 

“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath. 
The April baby, who has had a nursery gov¬ 
erness of an altogether alarmingly zealous type 





136 


ELIZABETH AND 


attached to her person for the last six weeks, 
looked up from her bread and milk. 

“ It sounds like islands,” she remarked pen¬ 
sively. 

The governess coughed. 

‘‘ Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” ex¬ 
plained her pupil. 

I looked at her severely. 

“ If you are not careful, April,” I said, “ you’ll 
be a genius when you grow up and disgrace your 
parents.” 

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like 
Germans. I am afraid she despises us because 
she thinks we are foreigners — an attitude of 
mind quite British and wholly to her credit; but 
we, on the other hand, regard her as a foreigner, 
which, of course, makes things complicated. 

‘‘ Shall I really have to have this strange 
girl ? ” I asked, addressing nobody in particular 
and not expecting a reply. 

You need not have her,” said the Man of 
Wrath composedly, ‘‘but you will. You will 
write to-day and cordially invite her, and when 
she has been here twenty-four hours you will 
quarrel with her. I know you, my dear.” 

“ Quarrel! I ? With a little art-student ?” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


137 


Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is perpet¬ 
ually scenting a scene, and is always ready to bring 
whole batteries of discretion and tact and good 
taste to bear on us, and seems to know we are dis¬ 
puting in an unseemly manner when we would 
never dream it ourselves but for the warning of 
her downcast eyes. I would take my courage in 
both hands and ask her to go, for besides this 
superfluity of discreet behaviour she is, although 
only nursery, much too zealous, and inclined to 
be always teaching and never playing; but, un¬ 
fortunately, the April baby adores her and is sure 
there never was any one so beautiful before. She 
comes every day with fresh accounts of the splen¬ 
dours of her wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of 
her umbrellas and hats; and Miss Jones looks 
oflFended and purses up her lips. In common 
with most governesses, she has a little dark down 
on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared 
one day at dinner with her own decorated in faith¬ 
ful imitation, having achieved it after much strug¬ 
gling, with the aid of a lead pencil and unbounded 
love. Miss Jones put her in the corner for im¬ 
pertinence. I wonder why governesses are so 
unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it is be¬ 
cause they are not married. Without venturing 


ELIZABETH AND 


138 

to differ entirely from the opinion of experience, 
I would add that the strain of continually having 
to set an example must surely be very great. It 
is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be a 
warning than an example, and governesses are but 
women, and women are sometimes foolish, and 
when you want to be foolish it must be annoying 
to have to be wise. 

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; 
or rather, when the carriage drove up, Irais got 
out of it alone, and informed me that there was 
a strange girl on a bicycle a little way behind. I 
sent back the carriage to pick her up, for it was 
dusk and the roads are terrible. 

‘^But why do you have strange girls here at 
all ?'' asked Irais rather peevishly, taking off her 
hat in the library before the fire, and otherwise 
making herself very much at home ; “ I don't like 
them. Tm not sure that they're not worse than 
husbands who are out of order. Who is she ? 
She would bicycle from the station, and is, I am 
sure, the first woman who has done it. The little 
boys threw stones at her." 

‘‘ Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance 
of the little boys. Never mind her. Let us 
have tea in peace before she comes." 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


139 


But we should be much happier without her,*’ 
she grumbled. “ Weren’t we happy enough in 
the summer, Elizabeth —just you and I ? ” 

‘‘Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, 
putting my arms round her. The flame of my 
affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day 
of her arrival; besides, this time I have prudently 
provided against her sinning with the salt-cellars 
by ordering them to be handed round like vege¬ 
table dishes. We had finished tea and she had 
gone up to her room to dress before Minora and 
her bicycle were got here. I hurried out to meet 
her, feeling sorry for her, plunged into a circle of 
strangers at such a very personal season as Christ¬ 
mas. But she was not very shy; indeed, she 
was less shy than I was, and lingered in the hall, 
giving the servants directions to wipe the snow 
off the tyres of her machine before she lent an 
attentive ear to my welcoming remarks. 

“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the 
station,” she said at last, when her mind was at rest 
about her bicycle ; “ I asked him how far it was, 
and what the roads were like, and he only smiled. 
Is he German.?* But of course he is — how odd 
that he didn’t understand. You speak English 
very well, — very well indeed, do you know.” 


140 


ELIZABETH AND 


By this time we were in the library, and she 
stood on the hearth-rug warming her back while 
I poured her out some tea. 

“ What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking 
round,and the hall is so curious too. Very old, 
isn't it ? There's a lot of copy here.'' 

The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall 
on her arrival and had come in with us, began to 
look about on the carpet. ‘‘ Copy?'' he inquired, 
“ Where's copy ?'' 

Oh — material, you know, for a book. Tm 
just jotting down what strikes me in your coun¬ 
try, and when I have time shall throw it into 
book form.'' She spoke very loud, as English 
people always do to foreigners. 

“ My dear,'' I said breathlessly to Irais, when 
I had got into her room and shut the door and 
Minora was safely in hers, what do you think 
— she writes books !'' 

“ What— the bicycling girl ?'' 

Yes — Minora — imagine it! '' 

We stood and looked at each other with awe¬ 
struck faces. 

How dreadful!'' murmured Irais. “ I never 
met a young girl who did that before.'' 

She says this place is full of copy.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


141 

‘‘ Full of what?” 

That’s what you make books with.” 

“ Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected ! 
A strange girl is always a bore among good 
friends, but one can generally manage her. But 
a girl who writes books — why, it isn’t respect¬ 
able ! And you can’t snub that sort of people; 
they’re unsnubbable.” 

Oh, but we’ll try ! ” I cried, with such hearti¬ 
ness that we both laughed. 

The hall and the library struck Minora most; 
indeed, she lingered so long after dinner in the 
hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put 
on his fur coat by way of a gentle hint. His 
hints are always gentle. 

She wanted to hear the whole story about the 
chapel and the nuns and Gustavus Adolphus, and 
pulling out a fat note-book began to take down 
what I said. I at once relapsed into silence. 

‘‘Well ? ” she said. 

“ That’s all.” 

“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.” 

“ It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come 
into the library ? ” 

In the library she again took up her stand 
before the fire and warmed herself, and we sat in 


142 


ELIZABETH AND 


a row and were cold. She has a wonderfully 
good profile, which is irritating. The wind, how¬ 
ever, is tempered to the shorn lamb by her eyes 
being set too closely together. 

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her 
chair, contemplated her critically beneath her 
long eyelashes. ‘‘You are writing a book?” 
she asked presently. 

“Well — yes, I suppose I may say that I am. 
Just my impressions, you know, of your country. 
Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing 
— I jot it down, and when I have time shall 
work it up into something, I daresay.” 

“ Are you not studying painting ? ” 

“Yes, but I can’t study that for ever. We 
have an English proverb: ‘ Life is short and Art 
is long’ — too long, I sometimes think — and 
writing is a great relaxation when I am tired.” 

“What shall you call it?” 

“ Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in 
Germany. It sounds well, and would be correct. 
Or Jottings from German Journeyings^ — I haven’t 
quite decided yet which.” 

“By the author of Prowls in Pomerania^ you 
might add,” suggested Irais. 

“ And Drivel from Dresdenf said I. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


H 3 

And Bosk from Berlinf added Irais. 

Minora stared. “ I don't think those two last 
ones would do/’ she said, “ because it is not to be 
a facetious book. But your first one is rather a 
good title,” she added, looking at Irais and draw¬ 
ing out her note-book. ‘‘ I think I’ll just jot 
that down.” 

‘‘ If you jot down all we say and then pub¬ 
lish it, will it still be your book } ” asked Irais. 

But Minora was so busy scribbling that she 
did not hear. 

And havey<?^^ no suggestions to make. Sage ? ” 
asked Irais, turning to the Man of Wrath, who 
was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence. 

‘‘ Oh, do you call him Sage ? ” cried Minora; 
“ and always in English ? ” 

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew 
what we did call him, and were afraid Minora 
would in time ferret it out and enter it in her 
note-book. The Man of Wrath looked none 
too well pleased to be alluded to under his very 
nose by our new guest as ‘‘ him.” 

‘‘ Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely. 

Though sages are not always husbands,” said 
Irais with equal gravity. “ Sages and husbands 
— sage and husbands-” she went on mus- 



144 


ELIZABETH AND 


ingly, ^^what does that remind you of, Miss 
Minora ? 

‘‘ Oh, I know, — how stupid of me ! ” cried 
Minora eagerly, her pencil in mid-air and her 
brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “ sage 
and, —why, — yes,— no,— yes, of course — oh,” 
disappointedly, but that’s vulgar — I can’t put 
it in.” 

What is vulgar ^ ” I asked. 

‘‘ She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said 
Irais languidly; “but it isn’t, it is very good.” 
She got up and walked to the piano, and, sitting 
down, began, after a little wandering over the 
keys, to sing. 

“ Do you play ? ” I asked Minora. 

“ Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of 
practice.” 

I said no more. I know what sort of 
playing is. 

When we were lighting our bedroom candles 
Minora began suddenly to speak in an unknown 
tongue. We stared. “ What is the matter with 
her murmured Irais. 

I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, 

you might prefer to talk German, and as it is 
all the same to me what I talk-” 



HER GERMAN GARDEN 


145 


Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “ We 
dice airing our English — don’t we, Elizabeth ? ” 
I don’t want my German to get rusty 
though,” said Minora; ‘‘I shouldn’t like to 
forget it.” 

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said 
Irais, twisting round her neck as she preceded 
us upstairs, “ ‘ ’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wis¬ 
dom to forget ’ ? ” 

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” 
I said hastily. 

“ What room is she in ? ” asked Irais. 

“No. 12.” 

“ Oh ! — do you believe in ghosts ? ” 

Minora turned pale. 

“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts 
here. Good-night. If you want anything, mind 
you ring.” 

“ And if you see anything curious in that 
room,” called Irais from her bedroom door, 
“ mind you jot it down.” 

'December o.'jth. — It is the fashion, I believe, 
to regard Christmas as a bore of rather a gross 
description, and as a time when you are invited 
to over-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry 


146 


ELIZABETH AND 


without just cause. As a matter of fact, it is 
one of the prettiest and most poetic institutions 
possible, if observed in the proper manner, and 
after having been more or less unpleasant to 
everybody for a whole year, it is a blessing to 
be forced on that one day to be amiable, and it 
is certainly delightful to be able to give presents 
without being ’ haunted by the conviction that 
you are spoiling the recipient, and will suffer 
for it afterward. Servants are only big children, 
and are made just as happy as children by little 
presents and nice things to eat, and, for days 
beforehand, every time the three babies go into 
the garden they expect to meet the Christ Child 
with His arms full of gifts. They firmly believe 
that it is thus their presents are brought, and it 
is such a charming idea that Christmas would be 
worth celebrating for its sake alone. 

As great secrecy is observed, the preparations 
devolve entirely on me, and it is not very easy 
work, with so many people in our own house and 
on each of the farms, and all the children, big and 
little, expecting their share of happiness. The 
library is uninhabitable for several davs before 
and after, as it is there that we have the trees and 
presents. All down one side are the trees, and 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


H 7 

the other three sides are lined with tables, a sepa¬ 
rate one for each person in the house. When 
the trees are lighted, and stand in their radiance 
shining down on the happy faces, I forget all the 
trouble it has been, and the number of times I 
have had to run up and down stairs, and the 
various aches in head and feet, and enjoy myself 
as much as anybody. First the June baby is 
ushered in, then the others and ourselves accord¬ 
ing to age, then the servants, then come the head 
inspector and his family, the other inspectors 
from the different farms, the mamsells, the book¬ 
keepers and secretaries, and then all the children, 
troops and troops of them — the big ones lead¬ 
ing the little ones by the hand and carrying the 
babies in their arms, and the mothers peeping 
round the door. As many as can get in stand 
in front of the trees, and sing two or three carols ; 
then they are given their presents, and go off 
triumphantly, making room for the next batch. 
My three babies sang lustily too, whether they 
happened to know what was being sung or not. 
They had on white dresses in honour of the 
occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed 
in a low-necked and short-sleeved garment, after 
the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever the 


148 


ELIZABETH AND 


state of the thermometer. Her arms are like 
miniature prize-fighter’s arms — I never saw 
such things; they are the pride and joy of her 
little nurse, who had tied them up with blue 
ribbons, and kept on kissing them. I shall cer¬ 
tainly not be able to take her to balls when she 
grows up, if she goes on having arms like that. 

When they came to say good-night, they were 
all very pale and subdued. The April baby had 
an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, 
which she said she was taking to bed, not because 
she liked him, but because she was so sorry for 
him, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me 
absently, and went away, only the April baby 
glancing at the trees as she passed and making 
them a curtesy. 

Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then 
she made the Japanese doll bow to them, which 
he did, in a very languid and blase fashion. 
“ You'll never see such trees again,” she told 
him, giving him a vindictive shake, “for you’ll 
be brokened long before next time.” 

She went out, but came back as though she 
had forgotten something. 

“ Thank the Christkind so much^ Mummy, 
won’t you, for all the lovely things He brought 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


149 


us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t 
you ? ” 

I cannot see that there was anything gross 
about our Christmas, and we were perfectly merry 
without any need to pretend, and for at least 
two days it brought us a little nearer together, 
and made us kind. Happiness is so whole¬ 
some ; it invigorates and warms me into piety 
far more effectually than any amount of trials 
and griefs, and an unexpected pleasure is the 
surest means of bringing me to my knees. In 
spite of the protestations of some peculiarly con¬ 
structed persons that they are the better for trials, 
I don’t believe it. Such things must sour us, 
just as happiness must sweeten us, and make us 
kinder, and more gentle. And will anybody 
affirm that it behoves us to be more thankful 
for trials than for blessings ? We were meant 
to be happy, and to accept all the happiness 
offered with thankfulness — indeed, we are none 
of us ever thankful enough, and yet we each get 
so much, so very much, more than we deserve. 
I know a woman — she stayed with me last 
summer — who rejoices grimly when those she 
loves suffer. She believes that it is our lot, 
and that it braces us and does us good, and she 


150 


ELIZABETH AND 


would shield no one from even unnecessary 
pain; she weeps with the sufferer, but is con¬ 
vinced it is all for the best. Well, let her con¬ 
tinue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden 
to teach her the beauty and the happiness of 
holiness, nor does she in the least desire to pos¬ 
sess one; her convictions have the sad gray 
colouring of the dingy streets and houses she 
lives amongst — the sad colour of humanity in 
masses. Submission to what people call their 
“lot” is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you 
cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take 
another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to 
the shrieks of your relations, to their gibes or 
their entreaties; don’t let your own microscopic 
set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; 
don’t be afraid of public opinion in the shape 
of the neighbour in the next house, when all 
the world is before you new and shining, and 
everything is possible, if you will only be ener¬ 
getic and independent and seize opportunity by 
the scruff of the neck. 

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “ no one would 
ever imagine that you dream away your days in 
a garden with a book, and that you never in your 
life seized anything by the scruff of its neck. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


151 

And what is scruff? I hope I have not got any 
on me.” And she craned her neck before the 
glass. 

She and Minora were going to help me deco¬ 
rate the trees, but very soon Irais wandered off 
to the piano, and Minora was tired and' took up 
a book; so I called in Miss Jones and the babies 
— it was Miss Jones’s last public appearance, 
as I shall relate — and after working for the best 
part of two days they were finished, and looked 
like lovely ladies in widespreading, sparkling 
petticoats, holding up their skirts with glittering 
fingers. Minora wrote a long description of 
them for a chapter of her book which is headed 
Noel^ — I saw that much, because she left it 
open on the table while she went to talk to Miss 
Jones. They were fast friends from the very 
first, and though it is said to be natural to take 
to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether 
to sympathise with such a reason for sudden 
affection. 

“ I wonder what they talk about ? ” I said to 
Irais yesterday, when there was no getting 
Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she en¬ 
gaged in conversation with Miss JoneSo 

“ Oh, my dear, how can I tell ? Lovers, I 


152 


ELIZABETH AND 


suppose, or else they think they are clever, and 
then they talk rubbish.’' 

“Well, of course. Minora thinks she is 
clever.” 

“ I suppose she does. What does it matter 
what she thinks ? Why does your governess 
look so gloomy ? When I see her at luncheon 
I always imagine she must have just heard that 
somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that every 
day. What is the matter with her ? ” 

“ I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she 
looks,” I said doubtfully; I was for ever trying 
to account for Miss Jones’s expression. 

“ But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. 
“ It would be awful for her if she felt exactly 
the same as she looks.” 

At that moment the door leading into the 
schoolroom opened softly, and the April baby, 
tired of playing, came in and sat down at my 
feet, leaving the door open ; and this is what we 
heard Miss Jones saying — 

“ Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the 
conscientious place upon themselves to appear 
so before their children and governess must be 
terrible. Nor are clergymen more pious than 
other men, yet they have continually to pose 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


153 


before their flock as such. As for governesses, 
Miss Minora, I know what I am saying when I 
afflrm that there is nothing more intolerable than 
to have to be polite, and even humble, to persons 
whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly ap¬ 
parent in every word they utter, and to be forced 
by the presence of children and employers to a 
dignity of manner in no way corresponding to 
one’s feelings. The grave father of a family, 
who was probably one of the least respectable 
of bachelors, is an interesting study at his own 
table, where he is constrained to assume airs of 
infallibility merely because his children are look¬ 
ing at him. The fact of his being a parent does 
not endow him with any supreme and sudden 
virtue; and I can assure you that among the 
eyes fixed upon him, not the least critical and 
amused are those of the humble person who 
fills the post of governess.” 

“ Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely ! ” we heard 
Minora say in accents of rapture, while we sat 
transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “ Do 
you mind if I put that down in my book ? You 
say it all so beautifully.” 

“ Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued 
Miss Jones, ‘‘of private indemnification for the 


154 


ELIZABETH AND 


toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could 
wade through days of correct behaviour ? There 
would be no reaction, no room for better impulses, 
no place for repentance. Parents, priests, and 
governesses would be in the situation of a stout 
lady who never has a quiet moment in which she 
can take off her corsets.” 

“ My dear, what a firebrand! ” whispered Irais. 
I got up and went in. They were sitting on the 
sofa. Minora with clasped hands, gazing admir¬ 
ingly into Miss Jones’s face, which wore a 
very different expression from the one of sour 
and unwilling propriety I have been used to 
seeing. 

May I ask you to come to tea ? ” I said to 
Minora. And I should like to have the chil¬ 
dren a little while.” 

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with 
the door open until she had gone in and the two 
babies had followed. They had been playing at 
stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of news¬ 
paper while Miss Jones provided Minora with 
noble thoughts for her work, and had to be tor¬ 
tured afterward with tweezers. I said nothing to 
Minora, but kept her with us till dinner-time, and 
this morning we went for a long sleigh-drive. 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


155 


When we came in to lunch there was no Miss 
Jones. 

“ Is Miss Jones ill ? ” asked Minora. 

“ She is gone,” I said. 

Gone ? ” 

“ Did you never hear of such things as sick 
mothers ? ” asked Irais blandly; and we talked 
resolutely of something else. 

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had 
found a kindred spirit, and it has been ruthlessly 
torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often are. 
It is enough to make her mope, and it is not her 
fault, poor thing, that she should have preferred 
the society of a Miss Jones to that of Irais and 
myself. 

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on 
one side. ‘‘You look so pale,” she said; “are 
you not well ? ” 

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the 
patient air of one who likes to be thought a 
sufferer. “ I have a slight headache,” she re¬ 
plied gently. 

“ I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais 
with great concern, “ because there is only a cow- 
doctor to be had here, and though he means well, 
I believe he is rather rough.” 


156 


ELIZABETH AND 


Minora was plainly startled. ‘‘ But what do 
you do if you are ill ? ” she asked. 

“ Ohj we are never ill/’ said I; the very 
knowledge that there would be no one to cure 
us seems to keep us healthy.” 

‘‘And if any one takes to her bed/’ said Irais, 
“ Elizabeth always calls in the cow-doctor.” 

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that 
she has got into a part of the world peopled solely 
by barbarians, and that the only civilised creature 
besides herself has departed and left her at our 
mercy. Whatever her reflections may be her 
symptoms are visibly abating. 

January \st. — The service on New Year’s 
Eve is the only one in the whole year that in the 
least impresses me in our little church, and then 
the very bareness and ugliness of the place and 
the ceremonial produce an effect that a snug ser¬ 
vice in a well-lit church never would. Last night 
we took Irais and Minora, and drove the three 
lonely miles in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark, 
and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped up 
to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a funeral 
procession. 

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


157 


sins,” said Irais, as we started ; and there cer¬ 
tainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air. 
Up in our gallery pew we tried to decipher our 
chorales by the light of the spluttering tallow 
candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the 
flames wildly blown about by the draughts. The 
wind banged against the windows in great gusts, 
screaming louder than the organ, and threatening 
to blow out the agitated lights together. The 
parson in his gloomy pulpit, surrounded by a 
framework of dusty carved angels, took on an 
awful appearance of menacing Authority as he 
raised his voice to make himself heard above the 
clatter. Sitting there in the dark, I felt very 
small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a 
great, big, black world. The church was as cold 
as a tomb; some of the candles guttered and 
went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of 
death and judgment; I thought I heard a child’s 
voice screaming, and could hardly believe it was 
only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of fore¬ 
bodings ; all my faith and philosophy deserted 
me, and I had a horrid feeling that I should 
probably be well punished, though for what I 
had no precise idea. If it had not been so dark, 
and if the wind had not howled so despairingly. 


158 


ELIZABETH AND 


I should have paid little attention to the threats 
issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, I fell to 
making good resolutions. This is always a bad 
sign, — only those who break them make them; 
and if you simply do as a matter of course that 
which is right as it comes, any preparatory resolv¬ 
ing to do so becomes completely superfluous. I 
have for some years past left off making them on 
New Year’s Eve, and only the gale happening as 
it did reduced me to doing so last night; for I 
have long since discovered that, though the year 
and the resolutions may be new, I myself am not, 
and it is worse than useless putting new wine into 
old bottles. 

But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indig¬ 
nantly, when I held forth to her to the above 
effect a few hours later in the library, restored to 
all my philosophy by the warmth and light, ^‘and 
I find my resolutions carry me very nicely into 
the spring. I revise them at the end of each 
month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By 
the end of April they have been so severely re¬ 
vised that there are none left.” 

“ There, you see I am right; if you were not 
an old bottle your new contents would gradually 
arrange themselves amiably as a part of you, and 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


159 


the practice of your resolutions would lose its bit¬ 
terness by becoming a habit.” 

She shook her head. ‘‘ Such things never lose 
their bitterness,” she said, ‘‘and that is why I 
don’t let them cling to me right into the summer. 
When May comes, I give myself up to jollity 
with all the rest of the world, and am too busy 
being happy to bother about anything I may have 
resolved when the days were cold and dark.” 

“ And that is just why I love you,” I thought. 
She often says what I feel. 

“ I wonder,” she went on after a pause, 
“ whether men ever make resolutions ? ” 

“ I don’t think they do. Only women indulge 
in such luxuries. It is a nice sort of feeling, 
when you have nothing else to do, giving way to 
endless grief and penitence, and steeping yourself 
to the eyes in contrition ; but it is silly. Why cry 
over things that are done ? Why do naughty 
things at all, if you are going to repent afterward ? 
Nobody is naughty unless they like being 
naughty; and nobody ever really repents unless 
they are afraid they are going to be found out.” 

“ By ‘ nobody ’ of course you mean women,” 
said Irais. 

“ Naturally ; the terms are synonymous. Be- 


i6o 


ELIZABETH AND 


sides, men generally have the courage of their 
opinions.” 

I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said 
Irais in the amiably polite tone she assumes when¬ 
ever she speaks to that young person. 

It was getting on towards midnight, and we 
were sitting round the fire, waiting for the New 
Year, and sipping GlUhwein, prepared at a small 
table by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, and 
sweet, and rather nasty, but it is proper to drink 
it on this one night, so of course we did. 

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. 
We very soon discovered that, and laugh about it 
when we are alone together. I can understand 
her disliking Irais, but she must be a perverse 
creature not to like me. Irais has poked fun at 
her, and I have been, I hope, very kind ; yet we 
are bracketed together in her black books. It is 
also apparent that she looks upon the Man of 
Wrath as an interesting example of an ill-used 
and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed 
to take him under her wing, and defend him on all 
occasions against us. He never speaks to her ; 
he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far 
as Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue 
at all, and sits sphinx-like and impenetrable while 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


i6i 


she takes us to task about some remark of a pro¬ 
fane nature that we may have addressed to him. 
One night, some days after her arrival, she de¬ 
veloped a skittishness of manner which has since 
disappeared, and tried to be playful with him ; 
but you might as well try to be playful with a 
graven image. The wife of one of the servants 
had just produced a boy, the first after a series of 
five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health 
of all parties concerned, the Man of Wrath mak¬ 
ing the happy father drink a glass oif* at one gulp, 
his heels well together in military fashion. Mi¬ 
nora thought the incident typical of German 
manners, and not only made notes about it, but 
joined heartily in the health-drinking, and after¬ 
ward grew skittish. 

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance 
called, I think, the Washington Post, and which 
was, she said, much danced in England; and, to 
induce us to learn, she played tpe tune to us 
on the piano. We remained un|ouched by its 
beauties, each buried in an easy-chair toasting 
our toes at the fire. Amongst those toes were 
those of the Man of Wrath, who sat peaceably 
reading a book and smoking. Minora volun¬ 
teered to show us the steps, and as we still did 


M 


i62 


ELIZABETH AND 


not move, danced solitary behind our chairs. 
Irais did not even turn her head to look, and I 
was the only one amiable or polite enough to do 
so. Do I deserve to be placed in Minora’s list 
of disagreeable people side by side with Irais ? 
Certainly not. Yet I most surely am. 

‘‘ It wants the music, of course,'^ observed 
Minora breathlessly, darting in and out between 
the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing 
at the Man of Wrath. 

No answer from anybody. 

“ It is such a pretty dance,” she panted again, 
after a few more gyrations. 

No answer. 

And is all the rage at home.” 

No answer. 

‘‘ Do let me teach you. Won’t you try, Herr 
Sage ? ” 

She went up to him and dropped him a little 
curtesy. It is thus she always addresses him, 
entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to every 
one else, that he resents it. 

‘‘ Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” 
she went on gaily, as he did not move; ‘‘ I am cer¬ 
tain it is only some dry agricultural work that you 
just nod over. Dancing is much better for you.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


163 


Irais and I looked at one another quite fright¬ 
ened. I am sure we both turned pale when the 
unhappy girl actually laid hold forcibly of his 
book, and, with a playful little shriek, ran away 
with it into the next room, hugging it to her 
bosom and looking back roguishly over her 
shoulder at him as she ran. There was an awful 
pause. We hardly dared raise our eyes. Then 
the Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the 
ashes off the end of his cigar, looked at his watch, 
and went out at the opposite door into his own 
rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the even¬ 
ing. She has never, I must say, been skittish since. 

I hope you are listening. Miss Minora,” said 
Irais, ‘‘because this sort of conversation is likely 
to do you good.” 

“ I always listen when people talk sensibly,” 
replied Minora, stirring her grog. 

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eye¬ 
brows. “ Do you agree with our hostess’s de¬ 
scription of women ? ” she asked after a pause. 

“As nobodies ? No, of course I do not.” 

“ Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we 
are literally nobodies in our country. Did you 
know that women are forbidden to go to political 
meetings here ^ ” 


164 


ELIZABETH AND 


“ Really ? ” Out came the note-book. 

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at 
such meetings of women, children, and idiots.’' 

“Children and idiots — I understand that,” 
said Minora; “but women — and classed with 
children and idiots ? ” 

“ Classed with children and idiots,” repeated 
Irais, gravely nodding her head. “ Did you 
know that the law forbids females of any age to 
ride on the top of omnibuses or tramcars ? ” 

“ Not really ? ” 

“ Do you know why ? ” 

“ I can’t imagine.” 

“ Because in going up and down the stairs 
those inside might perhaps catch a glimpse of the 
stocking covering their ankles.” 

“ But what-” 

“ Did you know that the morals of the German 
public are in such a shaky condition that a glimpse 
of that sort would be fatal to them ? ” 

“ But I don’t see how a stocking-” 

“With stripes round it,” said Irais. 

“And darns in it,” I added. 

“ — could possibly be pernicious? ” 

“ ‘ The Pernicious Stocking; or. Thoughts on 
the Ethics of Petticoats,’ ” said Irais. “ Put 




HER GERMAN GARDEN 165 

that down as the name of your next book on 
Germany/’ 

“ I never know,” complained Minora, letting 
her note-book fall, “whether you are in earnest 
or not.” 

“ Don’t you ? ” said Irais sweetly. 

“ Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of 
Wrath, busy with his lemons in the background, 
“ that your law classes women with children and 
idiots ? ” 

“ Certainly,” he answered promptly, “ and a 
very proper classification, too.” 

We all looked blank. “ That’s rude,” said I 
at last. 

“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied 
complacently. Then he added, “ If I were com¬ 
missioned to draw up a new legal code, and had 
previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been 
doing lately, of listening to the conversation of 
you three young ladies, I should make precisely 
the same classification.” 

Even Minora was incensed at this. 

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished 
manner that we are idiots,” said Irais. 

“ Idiots ? No, no, by no means. But children, 
—nice little agreeable children. I very much like 


i66 


ELIZABETH AND 


to hear you talk together. It is all so young and 
fresh what you think and what you believe, and 
not of the least consequence to any one.’' 

‘‘Not of the least consequence.^” cried Mi¬ 
nora. “ What we believe is of very great conse¬ 
quence indeed to us.” 

“ Are you jeering at our beliefs ? ” inquired 
Irais sternly. 

“ Not for worlds. I would not on any account 
disturb or change your pretty little beliefs. It 
is your chief charm that you always believe every¬ 
thing. How desperate would our case be if 
young ladies only believed facts, and never ac¬ 
cepted another person’s assurance, but preferred 
the evidence of their own eyes ! They would 
have no illusions, and a woman without illusions 
is the dreariest and most difficult thing to manage 
possible.” 

“ Thing ? ” protested Irais. 

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes 
up for it from time to time by holding forth at 
unnecessary length. He took up his stand now 
with his back to the fire, and a glass of Gliihwein 
in his hand. Minora had hardly heard his voice 
before, so quiet had he been since she came, 
and sat with her pencil raised, ready to fix for 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 167 

ever the wisdom that should flow from his 
lips. 

What would become of poetry if women 
became so sensible that they turned a deaf ear 
to the poetic platitudes of love ? That love does 
indulge in platitudes I suppose you will admit.” 
He looked at Irais. 

^^Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” 
she acknowledged. 

Who could murmur pretty speeches on the 
beauty of a common sacrifice, if the listener’s 
want of imagination was such as to enable her 
only to distinguish one victim in the picture, and 
that one herself.^ ” 

Minora took that down word for word,— 
much good may it do her. 

Who would be brave enough to affirm that 
if refused he will die, if his assurances merely 
elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take 
plenty of outdoor exercise ? Women are respon¬ 
sible for such lies, because they believe them. 
Their amazing vanity makes them swallow flat¬ 
tery so gross that it is an insult, and men will 
always be ready to tell the precise number of lies 
that a woman is ready to listen to. Who indulges 
more recklessly in glowing exaggerations than 


ELIZABETH AND 


168 

the lover who hopes, and has not yet obtained ? 
He will, like the nightingale, sing with unceas¬ 
ing modulations, display all his talent, untir¬ 
ingly repeat his sweetest notes, until he has 
what he wants, when his song, like the night¬ 
ingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be 
heard.” 

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to 
Minora — unnecessary advice, for her pencil was 
scribbling as fast as it could. 

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, 
after having had ninety-nine object-lessons in the 
difference between promise and performance and 
the emptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning 
of the hundredth will find her lending the same 
willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of 
flattery as she did on the occasion of the first. 
What can the exhortations of the strong-minded 
sister, who has never had these experiences, do 
for such a woman ^ It is useless to tell her she 
is man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that 
she is cheated, down-trodden, kept under, laughed 
at, shabbily treated in every way — that is not 
a true statement of the case. She is simply the 
victim of her own vanity, and against that, against 
the belief in her own fascinations, against the very 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 169 

part of herself that gives all the colour to her life, 
who shall expect a woman to take up arms ? ” 
“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais 
with a shocked face, “ and had you lent a willing 
ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before 
you reached your final destiny ? ” 

“ I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I 
replied, “ for nobody ever wanted me to listen to 
blandishments.” 

Minora sighed. 

“ I like to hear you talk together about the 
position of women,” he went on, “ and wonder 
when you will realise that they hold exactly the 
position they are fitted for. As soon as they are 
fit to occupy a better, no power on earth will be 
able to keep them out of it. Meanwhile, let me 
warn you that, as things now are, only strong- 
minded women wish to see you the equals of 
men, and the strong-minded are invariably plain. 
The pretty ones would rather see men their slaves 
than their equals.” 

“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I 
consider myself strong-minded.” 

“ And never rise till lunch-time ? ” 

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of 
such conduct, it is very convenient in more ways 


ELIZABETH AND 


170 

than one ; I get through my housekeeping undis¬ 
turbed, and whenever she is disposed to lecture 
me, I begin about this habit of hers. Her con¬ 
science must be terribly stricken on the point, 
for she is by no means as a rule given to meek¬ 
ness. 

A woman without vanity would be unattack- 
able,” resumed the Man of Wrath. “When a 
girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, 
she is led solely by her own vanity; for in these 
days of policemen no young woman can be forced 
against her will from the path of virtue, and the 
cries of the injured are never heard until the 
destroyer begins to express his penitence for 
having destroyed. If his passion could remain 
at white-heat and he could continue to feed her 
ear with the protestations she loves, no principles 
of piety or virtue would disturb the happiness of 
his companion; for a mournful experience teaches 
that piety begins only where passion ends, and 
that principles are strongest where temptations 
are most rare.” 

“ But what has all this to do with us ? ” I 
inquired severely. 

“ You were displeased at our law classing you 
as it does, and I merely wish to justify it,” he 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


171 

answered. ‘‘Creatures who habitually S2iy yes to 
everything a man proposes, when no one can 
oblige them to say it, and when it is so often 
fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.'’ 

“ I shall never say it to you again, my dear 
man,” I said. 

“ And not only that fatal weakness,” he con¬ 
tinued, “ but what is there, candidly, to distin¬ 
guish you from children ^ You are older, but 
not wiser, — really not so wise, for with years 
you lose the common sense you had as chil¬ 
dren. Have you ever heard a group of women 
talking reasonably together ” 

“Yes — we do ! ” Irais and I cried in a breath. 

“ It has interested me,” went on the Man of 
Wrath, “in my idle moments, to listen to their 
talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little 
stories they told of their best friends who were 
absent, to note the spiteful little digs they gave 
their best friends who were present, to watch the 
utter incredulity with which they listened to the 
tale of some other woman's conquests, the radiant 
good faith they displayed in connection with their 
own, the instant collapse into boredom, if some 
topic of so-called general interest, by some extraor¬ 
dinary chance, were introduced.” 


172 


ELIZABETH AND 


‘‘ You must have belonged to a particularly 
nice set,” remarked Irais. 

And as for politics,” he said, I have never 
heard them mentioned among women.” 

Children and idiots are not interested in such 
things,” I said. 

“ And we are much too frightened of being 
put in prison,” said Irais. 

In prison ? ” echoed Minora. 

“ Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her 
that if you talk about such things here you run 
a great risk of being imprisoned? ” 

‘‘ But why ? ” 

But why ? Because, though you yourself 
may have meant nothing but what was innocent, 
your words may have suggested something less 
innocent to the evil minds of your hearers; and 
then the law steps in, and calls it dolus eventualis^ 
and everybody says how dreadful, and off you 
go to prison and are punished as you deserve 
to be.” 

Minora looked mystified. 

‘‘That is not, however, your real reason for not 
discussing them,” said the Man of Wrath ; “ they 
simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that 
you do not consider your female friends’ opinions 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


173 


worth listening to, for you certainly display an 
astonishing thirst for information when male poli¬ 
ticians are present. I have seen a pretty young 
woman, hardly in her twenties, sitting a whole 
evening drinking in the doubtful wisdom of an 
-elderly political star, with every appearance of 
eager interest. He was a bimetallic star, and was 
giving her whole pamphletsful of information.” 

She wanted to make up to him for some 
reason,” said Irais, ‘‘ and got him to explain his 
hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken 
in. Now which was the sillier in that case ? ” 

She threw herself back in her chair and looked 
up defiantly, beating her foot impatiently on the 
carpet. 

‘‘ She wanted to be thought clever,” said the 
Man of Wrath. “What puzzled me,” he went 
on musingly, “ was that she went away apparently 
as serene and happy as when she came. The 
explanation of the principles of bimetallism pro¬ 
duce, as a rule, a contrary effect.” 

“ Why, she hadn't been listening,” cried Irais, 
“ and your simple star had been making a fine 
goose of himself the whole evening. 

“ Prattle, prattle, simple star, 

Bimetallic, wunderbar. 


ELIZABETH AND 


174 

Though you’re given to describe 
Woman as a dummes Welh, 

You yourself are sillier far, 

Prattling, bimetallic star ! ” 

doubt she had understood very little,” 
said the Man of Wrath, taking no notice of this 
effusion. 

‘‘ And no doubt the gentleman hadn't under¬ 
stood much either.” Irais was plainly irritated. 

“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a 
very small voice, “is not a high one. But, in 
the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no 
one could take her place ” 

“ If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I 
said, “ I must tell you that I believe he mar¬ 
ried chiefly that he might have a wife instead 
of a strange woman to nurse him when he is 
sick.” 

“ But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way 
her illusions were being knocked about, “ the 
sick-room is surely the very place of all others 
in which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most 
valuable.” 

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of 
Wrath. “ I have never met those qualities in 
the professional nurse. According to my experi- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


175 

ence, she is a disagreeable person who finds in 
private nursing exquisite opportunities for assert¬ 
ing her superiority over ordinary and prostrate 
mankind. I know of no more humiliating posi¬ 
tion for a man than to be in bed having his 
feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed 
strange woman, bristling with starch and spot¬ 
lessness. He would give half his income for his 
clothes, and probably the other half if she would 
leave him alone, and go away altogether. He 
feels her superiority through every pore; he 
never before realised how absolutely inferior he 
is ; he is abjectly polite, and contemptibly con¬ 
ciliatory ; if a friend comes to see him, he eagerly 
praises her in case she should be listening behind 
the screen ; he cannot call his soul his own, and, 
what is far more intolerable, neither is he sure 
that his body really belongs to him ; he has read 
of ministering angels and the light touch of a 
woman's hand, but the day on which he can ring 
for his servant and put on his socks in private 
fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy 
that he felt as a homesick schoolboy at the end 
of his first term." 

Minora was silent. Irais's foot was livelier than 
ever. The Man of Wrath stood smiling blandly 


176 ELIZABETH AND 

down upon us. You can't argue with a person 
so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he 
won't even get angry with you; so we sat round 
and said nothing. 

“ If/’ he went on, addressing Irais, who looked 
rebellious, you doubt the truth of my remarks, 
and still cling to the old poetic notion of noble, 
self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient 
over the rough places on the road to death or 
recovery, let me beg you to try for yourself, next 
time any one in your house is ill, whether the 
actual fact in any way corresponds to the pictu¬ 
resque belief. The angel who is to alleviate our 
sufferings comes in such a questionable shape, 
that to the unimaginative she appears merely as 
an extremely self-confident young woman, wisely 
concerned first of all in securing her personal 
comfort, much given to complaints about her 
food and to helplessness where she should be 
helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacity for 
fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the 
superior being she knows herself to be, morbidly 
anxious lest the servants should, by some mistake, 
treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if the 
patient gives more trouble than she had expected, 
intensely injured and disagreeable if he is made so 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


177 


courageous by his wretchedness as to wake her 
during the night — an act of desperation of which 
I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these 
good women ! What sane man wants to have to 
do with angels ? And especially do we object to 
having them about us when we are sick and sorry, 
when we feel in every fibre what poor things we 
are, and when all our fortitude is needed to enable 
us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, 
without being forced besides to assume an atti¬ 
tude of eager and grovelling politeness towards 
the angel in the house.*' 

There was a pause. 

“ I didn’t know you could talk so much. Sage,” 
said Irais at length. 

“ What would you have women do, then ? ” 
asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beat her 
foot up and down again, — what did it matter 
what Men of Wrath would have us do ? There 
are not,” continued Minora, blushing, husbands 
enough for every one, and the rest must do some¬ 
thing.” 

Certainly,” replied the oracle. Study the 
art of pleasing by dress and manner as long as 
you are of an age to interest us, and above all, let 
all women, pretty and plain, married and single. 


ELIZABETH AND 


178 

study the art of cookery. If you are an artist in 
the kitchen you will always be esteemed.’' 

I sat very still. Every German woman, even 
the wayward Irais, has learned to cook; I seem 
to have been the only one who was naughty and 
wouldn’t. 

‘‘Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying 
both arts, never to forget the great truth that 
dinner precedes blandishments and not blandish¬ 
ments dinner. A man must be made comfort¬ 
able before he will make love to you ; and though 
it is true that if you offered him a choice between 
Spickgans and kisses, he would say he would take 
both, yet he would invariably begin with the 
Spickgans^ and allow the kisses to wait.” 

At this I got up, and Irais followed my ex¬ 
ample. “Your cynicism is disgusting,” I said 
icily. 

“You two are always exceptions to anything I 
may say,” he said, smiling amiably. 

He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is 
inordinately vain of her hands, and says her hus¬ 
band married her for their sake, which I can quite 
believe. I am glad they are on her and not on 
Minora, for if Minora had had them I should 
have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


179 


chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and too 
much wrist. I feel very well disposed towards 
her when my eye falls on them. She put one 
forward now, evidently thinking it would be 
kissed too. 

“ Did you know,’' said Irais, seeing the move¬ 
ment, ‘^that it is the custom here to kiss women’s 
hands ? ” 

But only married women’s,” I added, not 
desiring her to feel out of it, “ never young girls’.” 

She drew it in 'again. ‘‘ It is a pretty custom,” 
she said with a sigh ; and pensively inscribed it in 
her book. 

January i^th. — The bills for my roses and 
bulbs and other last year’s horticultural indulgences 
were all on the table when I came down to break¬ 
fast this morning. They rather frightened me. 
Gardening is expensive, I find, when it has to be 
paid for out of one’s own private pin-money. 
The Man of Wrath does not in the least want 
roses, or flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new 
paths, and therefore, he asks, why should he pay 
for them } So he does not and I do, and I have 
to make up for it by not indulging all too riotously 
in new clothes, which is no doubt very chastening. 


i8o 


ELIZABETH AND 


I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to new 
dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and 
I see a time coming when the passion for my 
garden will have taken such a hold on me that 
I shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, 
but begin to sell those that I already have. The 
garden is so big that everything has to be bought 
wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on 
much longer with only one man and a stork, 
because the more I plant the more there will be 
to water in the inevitable drought, and the water¬ 
ing is a serious consideration when it means going 
backwards and forwards all day long to a pump 
near the house, with a little water-cart. People 
living in England, in almost perpetual mildness 
and moisture, don’t really know what a drought 
is. If they have some weeks of cloudless weather, 
it is generally preceded and followed by good 
rains ; but we have perhaps an hour’s shower 
every week, and then comes a month or six weeks’ 
drought. The soil is very light, and dries so 
quickly that, after the heaviest thunder-shower, I 
can walk over any of my paths in my thin shoes; 
and to keep the garden even moderately damp it 
should pour with rain regularly every day for 
three hours. My only means of getting water is 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


i8i 


to go to the pump near the house, or to the little 
stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the 
little stream dries up too unless there has been 
rain, and is at the best of times difficult to get at, 
having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. 
I possess one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that 
is to be planted with silver birches in imitation of 
the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between the 
birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my 
soil is sandy — the soil for pines and acacias, but 
not the soil for roses ; yet see what love will do — 
there are more roses in my garden than any other 
flower! Next spring the bare places are to be 
filled with trees that I have ordered: pines 
behind the delicate acacias, and startling moun¬ 
tain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches, 
juniper-trees — was it not Elijah who sat down 
to rest under a juniper-tree ? I have often won¬ 
dered how he managed to get under it. It is 
a compact little tree, not more than two to three 
yards high here, and all closely squeezed up 
together. Perhaps they grew more aggressively 
where he was. By the time the babies have 
grown old and disagreeable it will be very pretty 
here, and then possibly they won’t like it; and, 
if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s in- 


i 82 


ELIZABETH AND 


difference to gardens, they will let it run wild 
and leave it to return to the state in which I 
found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will 
refuse to live in it, or to come to such a lonely 
place at all, and then of course its fate is sealed. 
My only comfort is that husbands don’t flourish 
in the desert, and that the three will have to wait 
a long time before enough are found to go round. 
Mothers tell me that it is a dreadful business 
finding one husband ; how much more painful 
then to have to look for three at once!—the 
babies are so nearly the same age that they only 
just escaped being twins. But I won’t look. I 
can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a 
son-in-law, and besides, I don’t think a husband 
is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I shall 
do my best in the years at my disposal to train 
them so to love the garden, and out-door life, and 
even farming, that, if they have a spark of their 
mother in them, they will want and ask for noth¬ 
ing better. My hope of success is however 
exceedingly small, and there is probably a fearful 
period in store for me when I shall be taken 
every day during the winter to the distant towns 
to balls — a poor old mother shivering in broad 
daylight in her party gown, and being made to 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


183 

start after an early lunch and not getting home 
till breakfast-time next morning. Indeed, they 
have already developed an alarming desire to go 
to “ partings ” as they call them, the April baby 
announcing her intention of beginning to do so 
when she is twelve. “ Art you twelve. Mummy ? ” 
she asked. 

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, 
and I am trying to find another. It is grievous 
changing so often — in two years I shall have 
had three — because at each change a great part 
of my plants and plans necessarily suffers. Seeds 
get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in time, 
places already sown are planted with something 
else, and there is confusion out of doors and 
despair in my heart. But he was to have married 
the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and immedi¬ 
ately left, and he is going after her as soon as 
he can, and meanwhile is wasting visibly away. 
What she saw was doors that are locked opening 
with a great clatter all by themselves on the hinge- 
side^ and then somebody invisible cursed at her. 
These phenomena now go by the name of the 
ghost.” She asked to be allowed to leave at 
once, as she had never been in a place where 
there was a ghost before. I suggested that she 


184 


ELIZABETH AND 


should try and get used to it; but she thought 
it would be wasting time^ and she looked so ill 
that I let her go, and the garden has to suffer. 
I don't know why it should be given to cooks 
to see such interesting things and withheld from 
me, but I have had two others since she left, and 
they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows 
very silent as bed-time approaches, and relents 
towards Irais and myself; and, after having shown 
us all day how little she approves us, when the 
bedroom candles are brought she quite begins to 
cling. She has once or twice anxiously inquired 
whether Irais is sure she does not object to sleep¬ 
ing alone. 

If you are at all nervous, I will come and 
keep you company,” she said; “ I don’t mind 

at all, I assure you.” 

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple 
wiles, and has told me she would rather sleep 
with fifty ghosts than with one Minora. 

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called 
away to her parent’s bedside I have seen a good 
deal of the babies; and it is so nice without a 
governess that I would put off engaging another 
for a year or two, if it were not that I should in 
so doing come within the reach of the arm of the 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


185 


law, which is what every German spends his life 
in trying to avoid. The April baby will be six 
next month, and, after her sixth birthday is 
passed, we are liable at any moment to receive 
a visit from a school inspector, who will inquire 
curiously into the state of her education, and, if 
it is not up to the required standard, all sorts of 
fearful things might happen to the guilty parents, 
probably beginning with fines, and going on 
crescendo to dungeons if, owing to gaps between 
governesses and difficulties in finding the right 
one, we persisted in our evil courses. Shades 
of the prison-house begin to close here upon 
the growing boy, and prisons compass the 
Teuton about on every side all through life 
to such an extent that he has to walk very deli¬ 
cately indeed if he would stay outside them and 
pay for their maintenance. Cultured individ¬ 
uals do not, as a rule, neglect to teach their 
offspring to read, and write, and say their 
prayers, and are apt to resent the intrusion of 
an examining inspector into their homes; but 
it does not much matter after all, and I daresay 
it is very good for us to be worried; indeed, a 
philosopher of my acquaintance declares that 
people who are not regularly and properly wor- 


i86 


ELIZABETH AND 


ried are never any good for anything. In the 
eye of the law we are all sinners, and every man 
is held to be guilty until he has proved that he 
is innocent. 

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, 
after vainly trying to get out of their way for 
several days, she thought it better to resign her¬ 
self, and make the best of it by regarding them 
as copy, and using them to fill a chapter in her 
book. So she took to dogging their footsteps 
wherever they went, attended their uprisings and 
their lyings down, engaged them, if she could, in 
intelligent conversation, went with them into the 
garden to study their ways when they were sleigh¬ 
ing, drawn by a big dog, and generally made their 
lives a burden to them. This went on for three 
days, and then she settled down to write the re¬ 
sult with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, bor¬ 
rowed whenever her notes for any chapter have 
reached the state of ripeness necessary for the 
process she describes as “ throwing into form.” 
She writes everything with a typewriter, even her 
private letters. 

“ Don’t forget to put in something about a 
mother’s knee,” said Irais; ‘‘you can’t write 
effectively about children without that.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 187 

“ Oh, of course I shall mention that,'* replied 
Minora. 

‘^And pink toes,’’ I added. “There are 
always toes, and they are never anything but 
pink.” 

“ I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turn¬ 
ing over her notes. 

“ But, after all, babies are not a German spe¬ 
ciality,” said Irais, “ and I don’t quite see why 
you should bring them into a book of German 
travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the 
fashionable number of arms and legs, and are 
exactly the same as English ones.” 

“ Oh, but they can’t be just the same, you 
know,” said Minora, looking worried. “ It 
must make a difference living here in this place, 
and eating such odd things, and never having, a 
doctor, and never being ill. Children who have 
never had measles and those things can’t be quite 
the same as other children; it must all be in 
their systems and can’t get out for some reason 
or other. And a child brought up on chicken 
and rice-pudding must be different to a child 
that eats Spickgans and liver sausages. And they 
are different; I can’t tell in what way, but they 
certainly are; and I think if I steadily describe 


i88 


ELIZABETH AND 


them from the materials I have collected the last 
three days, I may perhaps hit on the points of 
difference.” 

‘‘ Why bother about points of difference ? ” 
asked Irais. I should write some little thing, 
bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as 
knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.” 

But it is by no means an easy thing for me 
to do,” said Minora plaintively ; ‘‘ I have so little 
experience of children.” 

Then why write it at all ? ” asked that sensi¬ 
ble person Elizabeth. 

I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, 
‘‘ because I have no children ; but if you don’t 
yearn after startling originality, nothing is easier 
than to write bits about them. I believe I could 
do a dozen in an hour.” 

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an 
old letter, and scribbled for about five minutes. 
“ There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you 
may have it — pink toes and all complete.” 

Minora put on her eye-glasses and read 
aloud: 

“ When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her 
hymns at bed-time my stale and battered soul is 
filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


crowd into my mind — memories of my own 
mother and myself — how many years ago ! — of 
the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half 
asleep in her arms, and undressed, and put in 
my,cot, without being wakened; of the angels I 
believed in ; of little children coming straight from 
heaven, and still being surrounded, so long as 
they were good, by the shadow of white wings, 
— all the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my 
baby is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She 
has not an idea of the beauty of the charming 
things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with 
heavenly eyes, while her mother talks of the 
heaven she has so lately come from, and is re¬ 
lieved and comforted by the interrupting bread 
and milk. At two years old she does not 
understand angels, and does understand bread 
and milk; at five she has vague notions about 
them, and prefers bread and milk; at ten both 
bread and milk and angels have been left behind 
in the nursery, and she has already found out 
that they are luxuries not necessary to her every¬ 
day life. In later years she may be disinclined 
to accept truths second-hand, insist on thinking 
for herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off 
exploded traditions, be untiring in her efforts to 


190 


ELIZABETH AND 


live according to a high moral standard and to be 
strong, and pure, and good-” 

“ Like tea,'’ explained Irais. 

— yet will she never, with all her virtues, 
possess one-thousandth part of the charm that 
clung about her when she sang, with quiet eye¬ 
lids, her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her 
mother's knees. I love to come in at bed-time 
and sit in the window in the setting sunshine 
watching the mysteries of her going to bed. Fler 
mother tubs her, for she is far too precious to be 
touched by any nurse, and then she is rolled up 
in a big bath towel, and only her little pink toes 
peep out; and when she is powdered, and combed, 
and tied up in her night-dress, and all her curls 
are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt 
down on her mother's lap, a little bundle of fra¬ 
grant flesh, and her face reflects the quiet of her 
mother's face as she goes through her evening 
prayer for pity and for peace." 

“ How very curious ! " said Minora, when she 
had finished. That is exactly what I was going 
to say." 

Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of 
putting it together; you can copy that if you 
like." 



HER GERMAN GARDEN 


191 

“ But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora ? ” I 
asked. 

“ Well, do you know, I rather think that is a 
good touch,” she replied; “ it will make people 
really think a man wrote the book. You know I 
am going to take a man’s name.” 

“ That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. 
“You will call yourself John Jones, or George 
Potts, or some such sternly commonplace name, 
to emphasise your uncompromising attitude 
towards all feminine weaknesses, and no one will 
be taken in.” 

“ I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me 
later, when the click of Minora’s typewriter was 
heard hesitating in the next room, “ that you and 
I are writing her book for her. She takes down 
everything we say. Why does she copy all that 
about the baby ? I wonder why mothers’ knees 
are supposed to be touching ? I never learned 
anything at them, did you ? But then in my case 
they were only stepmother’s, and nobody ever 
sings their praises.” 

“ My mother was always at parties,” I said ; 
“ and the nurse made me say my prayers in 
French.” 

“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, 


192 


ELIZABETH AND 


when I was a baby such things were not the 
fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and 
no tubs; our faces and hands were washed, and 
there was a foot-bath in the room, and in the sum¬ 
mer we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards 
for fear we might catch cold. My stepmother 
didn’t worry much; she used to wear pink dresses 
all over lace, and the older she got the prettier the 
dresses got. When is she going ” 

“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.” 

“ Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be 
neglected like this. She has been here an uncon¬ 
scionable time, — it must be nearly three weeks.” 

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said 
pleasantly. 

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that 
it is not worse to neglect one’s art than one’s 
husband, and her husband is lying all this time 
stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spend¬ 
ing her days so agreeably with me. She has a 
way of forgetting that she has a home, or any 
other business in the world than just to stay on 
chatting with me, and reading, and singing, and 
laughing at any one there is to laugh at, and 
kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of 
Wrath. Naturally I love her — she is so pretty 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


193 


that anybody with eyes in his head must love her 
— but too much of anything is bad, and next 
month the passages and offices are to be white¬ 
washed, and people who have ever whitewashed 
their houses inside know what nice places they 
are to live in while it is being done; and there 
will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those 
succulent salads full of caraway seeds that she 
so devotedly loves. I shall begin to lead her 
thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring 
every day anxiously after her husband’s health. 
She is not very fond of him, because he does not 
run and hold the door open for her every time 
she gets up to leave the room ; and though she 
has asked him to do so, and told him how much 
she wishes he would, he still won’t. She stayed 
once in a house where there was an Englishman, 
and his nimbleness in regard to doors and chairs 
so impressed her that her husband has had no 
peace since, and each time she has to go out of 
a room she is reminded of her disregarded wishes, 
so that a shut door is to her symbolic of the 
failure of her married life, and the very sight of 
one makes her wonder why she was born; at 
least, that is what she told me once, in a burst 
of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little 


194 


ELIZABETH AND 


man, pleasant to talk to, good-tempered, and full 
of fun ; but he thinks he is too old to begin to 
learn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that 
horror of being made better by his wife that dis¬ 
tinguishes so many righteous men, and is shared 
by the Man of Wrath, who persists in holding 
his glass in his left hand at meals, because if he 
did not (and I don’t believe he particularly likes 
doing it) his relations might say that marriage 
has improved him, and thus drive the iron into 
his soul. This habit occasions an almost daily 
argument between one or other of the babies and 
myself 

“ April, hold your glass in your right hand.” 

“ But papa doesn’t.” 

“ When you are as old as papa you can do as 
you like.” 

Which was embellished only yesterday by 
Minora adding impressively, ‘‘And only think 
how strange it would look if everybody held their 
glasses so.” 

April was greatly struck by the force of this 
proposition. 

January 28/^. — It is very cold, — fifteen 
degrees of frost R'eaumur^ but perfectly delicious, 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


195 


still, bright weather, and one feels jolly and ener¬ 
getic and amiably disposed towards everybody. 
The two young ladies are still here, but the air 
is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh on 
me any longer, and besides, they have both an¬ 
nounced their approaching departure, so that after 
all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace, 
and the house will have on its clean pinafore in 
time to welcome the spring. 

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to 
present it as a parting gift to the Man of Wrath; 
and the fact that I let her do it, and sat meekly 
times innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, 
that I am not vain. When Irais first saw it she 
laughed till she cried, and at once commissioned 
her to paint hers, so that she may take it away 
with her and give it to her husband on his birth¬ 
day, which happens to be early in February. 
Indeed, if it were not for this birthday, I really 
think she would have forgotten to go at all; but 
birthdays are great and solemn festivals with us, 
never allowed to slip by unnoticed, and always 
celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd 
of relations (gathered from far and near to tell 
you how well you are wearing, and that nobody 
would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), 


196 


ELIZABETH AND 


who stand round a sort of sacrificial altar, on which 
your years are offered up as a burnt-offering to 
the gods in the shape of lighted pink and white 
candles, stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. 
The cake with its candles is the chief feature, and 
on the table round it lie the gifts each person 
present is more or less bound to give. As my 
birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well 
as blotting-books and photograph-frames, and if 
it were in the summer I should get photograph- 
frames and blotting-books and no mittens ; but 
whatever the present may be, and by whomsoever 
given, it has to be welcomed with the noisiest 
gratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and 
such words as entzuckend^ reizend, h err lie 
wundervolly and siiss repeated over and over 
again, until the unfortunate Geburtstagskind feels 
indeed that another year has gone, and that she 
has grown older, and wiser, and more tired of folly 
and of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and all 
the morning the rites are celebrated, the cake 
eaten, healths drunk, speeches made, and hands 
nearly shaken off. The neighbouring parsons 
drive up, and when nobody is looking their wives 
count the candles in the cake; the active lady in 
the next Schloss spares time to send a pot of flow- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


197 


ers, and to look up my age in the Gotha Alma- 
nach; a deputation comes from the farms headed 
by the chief inspector in white kid gloves who 
invokes Heaven's blessings on the gracious lady’s 
head ; and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a 
corner trying on all the mittens. In the evening 
there is a dinner for the relations and the chief 
local authorities, with more health-drinking and 
speechifying, and the next morning, when I come 
downstairs thankful to have done with it, I am 
confronted by the altar still in its place, cake 
crumbs and candle-grease and all, because any 
hasty removal of it would imply a most lamenta¬ 
ble want of sentiment, deplorable in anybody, 
but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. 
All birthdays are observed in this fashion, and 
not a few wise persons go for a short trip just 
about the time theirs is due, and I think I shall 
imitate them next year; only trips to the country 
or seaside in December are not usually pleasant, 
and if I go to a town there are sure to be rela¬ 
tions in it, and then the cake will spring up mush- 
room-like from the teeming soil of their affection. 

I hope it has been made evident in these pages 
how superior Irais and myself are to the ordinary 
weaknesses of mankind ; if any further proof were 


198 


ELIZABETH AND 


needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both, 
in defiance of tradition, scorn this celebration of 
birthday rites. Years ago, when first I knew her, 
and long before we were either of us married, I 
sent her a little brass candlestick on her birthday ; 
and when mine followed a few months later, she 
sent me a note-book. No notes were written in 
it, and on her next birthday I presented it to 
her ; she thanked me profusely in the customary 
manner, and when my turn came I received the 
brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy 
the possession of each of these articles, and the 
present question is comfortably settled once and for 
all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We 
never mention this little arrangement except at the 
proper time, when we send a letter of fervid thanks. 

This radiant weather, when mere living is 
a joy, and sitting still over the fire out of the 
question, has been going on for more than a 
week. Sleighing and skating have been our 
chief occupation, especially skating, which is 
more than usually fascinating here, because the 
place is intersected by small canals communicat¬ 
ing with a lake and the river belonging to the 
lake, and as everything is frozen black and hard, 
we can skate for miles straight ahead without 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


199 


being obliged to turn round and come back 
again, — at all times an annoying, and even 
mortifying, proceeding. Irais skates beautifully : 
modesty is the only obstacle to my saying the 
same of myself; but I may remark that all Ger¬ 
mans skate well, for the simple reason that every 
year of their lives, for three or four months, 
they may do it as much as they like. Minora 
was astonished and disconcerted by finding her¬ 
self left behind, and arriving at the place where 
tea meets us half an hour after we had finished. 
In some places the banks of the canals are so 
high that only our heads appear level with the 
fields, and it is, as Minora noted in her book, 
a curious sight to see three female heads skim¬ 
ming along apparently by themselves, and enjoy¬ 
ing it tremendously. When the banks are low, 
we appear to be gliding deliciously over the 
roughest ploughed fields, with or without legs 
according to circumstances. Before we start, I 
fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to 
meet us, and we drive home again; because 
skating against the wind is as detestable as skat¬ 
ing with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature 
arranges its blowing without the smallest regard 
for our convenience. 


200 


ELIZABETH AND 


Yesterday, by way of a change, we went for a 
picnic to the shores of the Baltic, ice-bound at 
this season, and utterly desolate at our nearest 
point. I have a weakness for picnics, especially in 
winter, when the mosquitoes cease from troubling 
and the ant-hills are at rest; and of all my many 
favourite picnic spots this one on the Baltic is the 
loveliest and best. As it is a three-hours* drive, 
the Man of Wrath is loud in his lamentations 
when the special sort of weather comes which 
means, as experience has taught him, this particu¬ 
lar excursion. There must be deep snow, hard 
frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on 
waking up, I see these conditions fulfilled, then it 
would need some very potent reason to keep me 
from having out a sleigh and going off. It is, I 
admit, a hard day for the horses ; but why have 
horses if they are not to take you where you want 
to go to, and at the time you want to go ? And 
why should not horses have hard days as well as 
everybody else ? The Man of Wrath loathes pic¬ 
nics, and has no eye for nature and frozen seas, and 
is simply bored by a long drive through a forest 
that does not belong to him ; a single turnip on his 
own place is more admirable in his eyes than the 
tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


201 


its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. 
Now observe the superiority of woman, who sees 
that both are good, and after having gazed at the 
pine and been made happy by its beauty, goes 
home and placidly eats the turnip. He went once 
and only once to this particular place, and made 
us feel so small by his hlase behaviour that I never 
invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless 
forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye 
can reach ; and after driving through it for miles 
you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue of 
arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with 
the orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks 
shining in the sunlight. Whenever I have been 
there it has been windless weather, and the silence 
so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. 
The humming of insects and the sudden scream 
of a jay are the only sounds in summer, and in 
winter the stillness is the stillness of death. 

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and 
this one is so infested by mosquitoes during the 
season when picnics seem most natural, that those 
of my visitors who have been taken there for a 
treat have invariably lost their tempers, and made 
the quiet shores ring with their wailing and 
lamentations. These despicable but irritating in- 


202 


ELIZABETH AND 


sects don’t seem to have anything to do but to 
sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for any prey 
Providence may send them; and as soon as the 
carriage appears they rise up in a cloud, and rush 
to meet us, almost dragging us out bodily, and 
never leave us until we drive away again. The 
sudden view of the sea from the mossy, pine-cov¬ 
ered height directly above it where we picnic ; the 
wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forest 
to the water’s edge ; the coloured sails in the blue 
distance ; the freshness, the brightness, the vast¬ 
ness — all is lost upon the picnickers, and made 
worse than indifferent to them, by the perpetual 
necessity they are under of fighting these horrid 
creatures. It is nice being the only person who 
ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but if 
more people went, perhaps the mosquitoes would 
be less lean, and hungry, and pleased to see us. 
It has, however, the advantage of being a suitable 
place to which to take refractory visitors when 
they have stayed too long, or left my books out 
in the garden all night, or otherwise made their 
presence a burden too grievous to be borne ; then 
one fine hot morning when they are all looking 
limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on the Baltic. 
I have never known this proposal fail to be 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


203 


greeted with exclamations of surprise and de¬ 
light. 

“ The Baltic! You never told us you were 
within driving distance ? How heavenly to get a 
breath of sea air on a day like this ! The very 
thought puts new life into one ! And how delight¬ 
ful to see the Baltic ! Oh.,please take us ! ” And 
then I take them. 

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience 
is as clear as the frosty air itself, and yesterday 
morning we started off in the gayest of spirits, 
even Minora being disposed to laugh immoder¬ 
ately on the least provocation. Only our eyes 
were allowed to peep out from the fur and wool¬ 
len wrappings necessary to our heads if we would 
come back with our ears and noses in the same 
places they were in when we started, and for the 
first two miles the mirth created by each other’s 
strange appearance was uproarious, — a fact I 
mention merely to show what an effect dry, 
bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, 
and how much better it is to go out in it and 
enjoy it than to stay indoors and sulk. As we 
passed through the neighbouring village with 
cracking of whip and jingling of bells, heads 
popped up at the windows to stare, and the only 


204 


ELIZABETH AND 


living thing in the silent, sunny street was a mel¬ 
ancholy fowl with ruffled feathers, which looked 
at us reproachfully, as we dashed with so much 
energy over the crackling show. 

“ Oh, foolish bird! ” Irais called out as we 
passed; ‘^you’ll be indeed a cold fowl if you 
stand there motionless, and every one prefers 
them hot in weather like this ! ” 

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though 
the most splendid joke had been made, and be¬ 
fore we had done we were out of the village and 
in the open country beyond, and could see my 
house and garden far away behind, glittering in 
the sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest, 
with its vistas of pines stretching away into infin¬ 
ity, and a drive through it of fourteen miles 
before we reached the sea. It was a hoar-frost 
day, and the forest was an enchanted forest lead¬ 
ing into fairyland, and though Irais and I have 
been there, often before, and always thought it 
beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the final 
arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer 
loveliness of the place. For a long way out the 
sea was frozen, and then there was a deep blue 
line, and a cluster of motionless orange sails ; at 
our feet a narrow strip of pale yellow sand ; right 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


205 


and left the line of sparkling forest; and we our¬ 
selves standing in a world of white and diamond 
traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay 
on the place like a benediction. 

Minora broke the silence by remarking that 
Dresden was pretty, but she thought this beat it 
almost. 

“ I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed 
voice, as though she were in a holy place, “how 
the two can be compared.” 

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” 
replied Minora; after which we turned away and 
thought we would keep her quiet by feeding her, 
so we went back to the sleigh and had the horses 
taken out and their cloths put on, and they were 
walked up and down a distant glade while we sat 
in the sleigh and picnicked. It is a hard day for 
the horses, — nearly thirty miles there and back 
and no stable in the middle; but they are so fat 
and spoiled that it cannot do them much harm 
sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I 
warmed soup in a little apparatus I have for 
such occasions, which helped to take the chilli¬ 
ness off the sandwiches, — this is the only 
unpleasant part of a winter picnic, the clammy 
quality of the provisions just when you most long 


2 o 6 


ELIZABETH AND 


for something very hot. Minora let her nose 
very carefully out of its wrappings, took a mouth¬ 
ful, and covered it up quickly again. She was 
nervous lest it should be frost-nipped, and truth 
compels me to add that her nose is not a bad 
nose, and might even be pretty on anybody else; 
but she does not know how to carry it, and there 
is an art in the angle at which one’s nose is held 
just as in everything else, and really noses were 
intended for something besides mere blowing. 

It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat 
sandwiches with immense fur and woollen gloves 
on, and I think we ate almost as much fur as any¬ 
thing, and choked exceedingly during the process. 
Minora was angry at this, and at last pulled off 
her glove, but quickly put it on again. 

How very unpleasant,” she remarked after 
swallowing a large piece of fur. 

‘‘ It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them 
warm,” said Irais. 

‘‘ Pipes! ” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by 
such vulgarity. 

“ I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she 
continued tb choke and splutter; ‘‘we are all 
in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter 
it.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


207 


There are such things as forks, I suppose,’* 
snapped Minora. 

‘‘ That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obvious¬ 
ness of the remedy; but of what use are forks if 
they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to 
continue to eat her gloves. 

By the time we had finished, the sun was 
already low behind the trees and the clouds begin¬ 
ning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman 
was given sandwiches and soup, and while he led 
the horses up and down with one hand and held 
his lunch in the other, we packed up — or, to be 
correct, I packed, and the others looked on and 
gave me valuable advice. 

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years 
old, and was born on the place, and has driven its 
occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as fond 
of him as I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t 
know what I should do without him, so entirely 
does he appear to understand and approve of my 
tastes and wishes. No drive is too long or difficult 
for the horses if I want to take it, no place im¬ 
possible to reach if I want to go to it, no weather 
or roads too bad to prevent my going out if I 
wish to : to all my suggestions he responds with 
the readiest cheerfulness, and smoothes away all 


2 o8 


ELIZABETH AND 


objections raised by the Man of Wrath, who 
rewards his alacrity in doing my pleasure by 
speaking of him as an alter Esel. In the sum¬ 
mer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and 
alone in the scented forests, and when I have 
reached a dark part stop, and sit quite still, listening 
to the nightingales repeating their little tune over 
and over again after interludes of gurgling, or if 
there are no nightingales, listening to the marvel¬ 
lous silence, and letting its blessedness descend into 
my very soul. The nightingales in the forests 
about here all sing the same tune, and in the same 
key of (E flat). 

I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, 
or if it is peculiar to this particular spot. When 
they have sung it once, they clear their throats 
a little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it 
is the prettiest little song in the world. How 
could I indulge my passion for these drives with 
their pauses without Peter? He is so used to 
them that he stops now at the right moment with¬ 
out having to be told, and he is ready to drive me 
all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything but 
cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The 
Man of Wrath deplores these eccentric tastes, as 
he calls them, of mine; but has given up trying 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


2og 


to prevent my indulging them because, while he 
is deploring in one part of the house, I have 
slipped out at a door in the other, and am gone 
before he can catch me, and have reached and am 
lost in the shadows of the forest by the time he 
has discovered that I am nowhere to be found. 

The brightness of Peter's perfections are sullied 
however by one spot, and that is, that as age 
creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the 
horses in if they don’t want to be held in, but he 
goes to sleep sometimes on his box if I have him 
out too soon after lunch, and has upset me twice 
within the last year—once last winter out of a 
sleigh, and once this summer, when the horses 
shied at a bicycle, and bolted into the ditch on one 
side of the chaussee (German for high road), and 
the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying 
that it shied too into the ditch on the other side, 
and the carriage was smashed, and the bicycle 
was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, ex¬ 
cept Peter, who never lost his pleasant smile, and 
looked so placid that my tongue clave to the roof 
of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him. 

But I should think he ought to have been 
thoroughly scolded on an occasion like that,” said 
Minora, to whom I had been telling this story as 


210 


ELIZABETH AND 


we wandered on the yellow sands while the horses 
were being put in the sleigh ; and she glanced 
nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was visi¬ 
ble between the bushes above us. Shall we get 
home before dark ?she asked. 

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the 
pines and only the very highest of the little clouds 
were still pink; out at sea the mists were creeping 
up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned 
a dull brown; a flight of wild geese passed across 
the disc of the moon with loud cacklings. 

“ Before dark ?'' echoed Irais, “ I should think 
not. It is dark now nearly in the forest, and we 
shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.” 

But it is surely very dangerous to let a 
man who goes to sleep drive you,” said Minora 
apprehensively. 

But he's such an old dear,” I said. 

‘^Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily-; 
‘‘ but there are wakeful old dears to be had, and 
on a box they are preferable.” 

Irais laughed. ‘‘You are growing quite amus¬ 
ing, Miss Minora,” she said. 

“He isn't on a box to-day,” said I; “and I 
never knew him to go to sleep standing up 
behind us on a sleigh.” 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


21 I 


But Minora was not to be appeased, aud 
muttered something about seeing no fun in fool¬ 
hardiness, which shows how alarmed she was, for 
it was rude. 

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way 
home, and Irais and 1 at least were as happy as 
possible driving back, with all the glories of the 
western sky flashing at us every now and then at 
the end of a long avenue as we swiftly passed, 
and later on, when they had faded, myriads of 
stars in the narrow black strip of sky over our 
heads. It was bitterly cold, and Minora was 
silent, and not in the least inclined to laugh with 
us as she had been six hours before. 

Have you enjoyed yourself. Miss Minora?” 
inquired Irais, as we got out of the forest on to 
the chaussee^ and the lights of the village before 
ours twinkled in the distance. 

‘‘ How many degrees do you suppose there 
are now ? ” was Minora's reply to this question. 

“ Degrees? — Of frost ? Oh, dear me, are you 
cold ? ” cried Irais solicitously. 

Well, it isp't exactly warm, is it?” said Minora 
sulkily; and Irais pinched me. ‘‘Well, but think 
how much colder you would have been without all 
that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” she said. 


212 


ELIZABETH AND 


‘‘ And what a nice chapter you will be able to 
write about the Baltic/' said I. ‘‘Why, it is 
practically certain that you are the first English 
person who has ever been to just this part of it.” 

“ Isn't there some English poem/' said Irais, 

about being the first who ever burst-'' 

‘ Into that silent sea/'' finished Minora 
hastily. ‘^You can't quote that without its con¬ 
text, you know.'' 

‘‘ But I wasn't going to,'' said Irais meekly; 
“ I only paused to breathe. I must breathe, or 
perhaps I might die.'' 

The lights from my energetic friend's Scbloss 
shone brightly down upon us as we passed round 
the base of the hill on which it stands ; she is 
very proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing 
that it is the only one in the whole district. 

‘‘ Do you never go there ?'' asked Minora, 
jerking her head in the direction of the house. 

“ Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and 
I should feel I was in the way if I went often.'' 

“It would be interesting to see another North 
German interior/' said Minora’; “and I should 
be obliged if you would take me.'' 

“ But I can't fall upon her suddenly with a 
strange girl/' I protested; “and we are not at 



HER GERMAN GARDEN 


213 


all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking 
all my visitors to see her.” 

‘‘What do you want to see another interior 
for ? ” asked Irais. “ I can tell you what it is 
like; and if you went nobody would speak to 
you, and if you were to ask questions, and began 
to take notes, the good lady would stare at you 
in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth 
had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. 
Everybody is not as patient as Elizabeth,” added 
Irais, anxious to pay off old scores. 

“ I would do a great deal for you. Miss 
Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do that.” 

“ If we went,” said Irais, “ Elizabeth and I 
would be placed with great ceremony on a sofa 
behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet- 
mat in the centre — it has got a crochet-mat in 
the centre, hasn’t it ? ” I nodded. “ And you 
would sit on one of the four little podgy, buttony, 
tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other 
side of the table facing the sofa. They are red, 
Elizabeth ” Again I nodded. “ The floor is 
painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a 
rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark 
chocolate colour, almost black; that is in order 
that after years of use the dirt may not show, and 


214 


ELIZABETH AND 


the room need not be done up. Dirt is like 
wickedness, you see. Miss Minora — its being 
there never matters; it is only when it shows so 
much as to be apparent to everybody that we are 
ashamed of it. At intervals round the high walls 
are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and 
in one corner is a great white cold stove — or is it 
majolica ? ” she asked, turning to me. 

“ No, it is white.” 

There are a great many lovely big windows, 
all ready to let in the air and the sun, but they are 
as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under 
heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses 
were just opposite, with peering eyes at every 
window trying to look in, instead of there only 
being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no 
sunlight, no books, no flowers ; but a consoling 
smell of red cabbage coming up under the door, 
mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.” 

When did you go there ? ” asked Minora. 

“ Ah, when did I go there indeed ? When did 
I not go there ? I have been calling there all my 
life.” 

Minora's eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then 
at Irais from the depths of her head-wrappings ; 
they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


215 


far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by 
itself is fine, but they are put in all wrong. 

The only thing you would learn there,” went 
on Irais, would be the significance of sofa corners 
in Germany. If we three went there together, I 
should be ushered into the right-hand corner of 
the sofa, because it is the place of honour, and I 
am the greatest stranger; Elizabeth would be in¬ 
vited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as 
next in importance; the hostess would sit near us 
in an arm-chair; and you, as a person of no im¬ 
portance whatever, would either be left to sit where 
you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, 
and with the entire breadth of the table between us 
to mark the immense social gulf that separates the 
married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa 
corners make the drawing of nice distinctions 
possible in a way that nothing else could. The 
world might come to an end, and create less sen¬ 
sation in doing it, than you would. Miss Minora, 
if by any chance you got into the right-hand 
corner of one. That you are put on a chair on the 
other side of the table places you at once in the 
scale of precedence, and exactly defines your social 
position, or rather your complete want of a social 
position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever sg 


2i6 


ELIZABETH AND 


little heavenwards. “Note it,” she added, “as 
the heading of your next chapter.” 

“ Note what ? ” asked Minora impatiently. 

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas', of 
course,” replied Irais. “ If,” she continued, as 
Minora made no reply appreciative of this sug¬ 
gestion, “ you were to call unexpectedly, the bad 
luck which pursues the innocent would most 
likely make you hit on a washing-day, and the 
distracted mistress of the house would keep you 
waiting in the cold room so long while she changed 
her dress, that you would begin to fear you were to 
be left to perish from want and hunger ; and when 
she did appear, would show by the bitterness of 
her welcoming smile the rage that was boiling in 
her heart.” 

“But what has the mistress of the house to do 
with washing ? ” 

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, 
you sweet innocent—pardon my familiarity, but 
such ignorance of country-life customs is very 
touching in one who is writing a book about 
them. ” 

“ Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” 
said Minora loftily. 

“ Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “ are 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


217 


seasons set apart by the Hausfrau to be kept holy. 
They only occur every two or three months, and 
while they are going on the whole house is in an 
uproar, every other consideration sacrificed, hus¬ 
band and children sunk into insignificance, and no 
one approaching, or interfering with the mistress 
of the house during these days of purification, 
but at their peril.” 

You don't really mean,” said Minora, ‘‘ that 
you only wash your clothes four times a year ? ” 

‘‘ Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais. 

Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said 
Minora emphatically. 

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of 
hers. ‘‘ Then you must take care and not marry 
a German,” she said. 

But what is the object of it ? ” went on 
Minora. 

‘‘ Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.” 

‘‘Yes, yes, but why only at such long in¬ 
tervals ? ” 

“ It is an outward and visible sign of vast pos¬ 
sessions in the shape of linen. If you were to 
want to have your clothes washed every week, 
as you do in England, you would be put down 
as a person who only has just enough to last 


2i8 


ELIZABETH AND 


that length of time, and would be an object of 
general contempt.’' 

“ But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, 
‘‘ and my house would not be full of accumulated 
dirt.” 

We said nothing — there was nothing to be 
said. 

“ It must be a happy land, that England of 
yours,” Irais remarked after a while with a sigh — 
a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her 
mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile 
gentlemen darting at door-handles. 

It is a clean land, at any rate,” replied 
Minora. 

‘W don’t want to go and live in it,” I said — 
for we were driving up to the house, and a 
memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my 
mind as I looked up fondly at its dear old west 
front, and I felt that what I want is to live and 
die just here, and that there never was such a 
happy woman as Elizabeth. 

April \ %th. — I have been so busy ever since 
Irais and Minora left that I can hardly believe 
the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on 
its green and flowered petticoat — only its petti- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


219 


coat as yet, for though the underwood is a fairy¬ 
land of tender little leaves, the trees above are 
still quite bare. 

February was gone before I well knew that it 
had come, so deeply was I engaged in making 
hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias, 
verbenas, and nicotina affinis; while no less than 
thirty are dedicated solely to vegetables, it having 
been borne in upon me lately that vegetables 
must be interesting things to grow, besides pos¬ 
sessing solid virtues not given to flowers, and 
that I might as well take the orchard and kitchen 
garden under my wing. So I have rushed in 
with all the zeal of utter inexperience, and my 
February evenings were spent poring over gar¬ 
dening books, and my days in aj^plying the 
freshly absorbed wisdom. Who says that Feb¬ 
ruary is a dull, sad, slow month in the country ? 
It was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description 
here, and its mild days enabled me to get on 
beautifully with the digging and manuring, and 
filled my rooms with snowdrops. The longer 
I live the greater is my respect and affection for 
manure in all its forms, and already, though the 
year is so young, a considerable portion of its 
pin-money has been spent on artificial manure. 


220 


ELIZABETH AND 


The Man of Wrath says he never met a young 
woman who spent her money that way before; 
I remarked that it must be nice to have an orig¬ 
inal wife; and he retorted that the word original 
hardly described me, and that the word eccentric 
was the one required. Very well, 1 suppose I 
am eccentric, since even my husband says so; 
but if my eccentricities are of such a practical 
nature as to result later in the biggest cauli¬ 
flowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia, why 
then he ought to be the first to rise up and call 
me blessed. 

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, 
as they are not grown here, and people try and 
make boiled cucumbers take their place; but 
boiled cucumbers are nasty things, and I don’t 
see why marrows should not do here perfectly 
well. These, and primrose-roots, are the English 
contributions to my garden. I brought over the 
roots in a tin box last time I came from England, 
and am anxious to see whether they will consent 
to live here. Certain it is that they don’t exist in 
the Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter 
kills them, for surely, if such lovely things would 
grow, they never would have been overlooked. 
Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


221 


reads so many English books, and has heard so 
much about primroses, and they have got so mixed 
up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and 
Disraelis, that she longs to see this mysterious 
political flower, and has made me promise to tele¬ 
graph when it appears, and she will come over. 
But they are not going to do anything this year, 
and I only hope those cold days did not send 
them off to the Paradise of flowers. I am afraid 
their first impression of Germany was a chilly 
one. 

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires 
after the garden and the babies, and announces her 
intention of coming back as soon as the numerous 
relations staying with her have left, — ‘‘which they 
won’t do,” she wrote the other day, “ until the first 
frosts nip them off, when they will disappear like 
belated dahlias — double ones of course, for single 
dahlias are too charming to be compared to rela¬ 
tions. I have every sort of cousin and uncle and 
aunt here, and here they have been ever since my 
husband’s birthday — not the same ones exactly, 
but I get so confused that I never know where one 
ends and the other begins. My husband goes off 
after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I 
am left at their mercy. I wish 1 had crops to 


222 


ELIZABETH AND 


go and look at — I should be grateful even for 
one, and would look at it from morning till night, 
and quite star^ it out of countenance, sooner than 
stay at home and have the truth told me by enig¬ 
matic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha ? 
she, in particular, spends her time propounding 
obscure questions for my solution. I get so tired 
and worried trying to guess the answers, which are 
always truths supposed to be good for me to hear. 
‘ Why do you wear your hair on your forehead ?' 
she asks, — and that sets me off wondering why I 
do wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to 
know for, or whether she does know and only 
wants to know if I will answer truthfully. ‘ I am 
sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after 
puzzling over it for ever so long; ^ perhaps my 
maid knows. Shall I ring and ask her ? ’ And 
then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an 
ugly line she says I have down the middle of my 
forehead, and that betokens a listless and discon¬ 
tented disposition. Well, if she knew, what did 
she ask me for ? Whenever I am with them they 
ask me riddles like that, and I simply lead a dog s 
life. Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs,— 
useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in 
small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully per- 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


223 


nicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid 
them/' 

From Minora I have only had one communica¬ 
tion since her departure, in which she thanked me 
for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending 
me a bottle of English embrocation to rub on my 
bruises after skating; that it was wonderful stuff, 
and she was sure I would like it; and that it cost 
two marks, and would I send stamps. I pondered 
long over this. Was it a parting hit, intended as 
revenge for our having laughed at her ? Was she 
personally interested in the sale of embrocation ? 
Or was it merely Minora's idea of a graceful 
return for my hospitality ? As for bruises, nobody 
who skates decently regards it as a bruise-produc¬ 
ing exercise, and whenever there were any they 
were all on Minora; but she did happen to turn 
round once, I remember, just as I was in the act 
of tumbling down for the first and only time, and 
her delight was but thinly veiled by her excessive 
solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the stamps, 
received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop 
out of my life; I had been a good Samaritan to 
her at the request of my friend, but the best of 
Samaritans resents the offer of healing oil for his 


own use. 


224 


ELIZABETH AND 


But why waste a thought on Minora at Easter, 
the real beginning of the year in defiance of 
calendars. She belongs to the winter that is past, 
to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot 
in the life I shall lead for the next six months. 
Oh, I could dance and sing for joy that the spring 
is here! What a resurrection of beauty there is 
in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! 
The whole of this radiant Easter day I have spent 
out of doors, sitting at first among the windflowers 
and celandines, and then, later, walking with the 
babies to the Hirschwald, to see what the spring 
had been doing there; and the afternoon was so 
hot that we lay a long time on the turf, blinking 
up through the leafless branches of the silvei 
birches at the soft, fat little white clouds floating 
motionless in the blue. We had tea on the grass 
in the sun, and when it began to grow late, and 
the babies were in bed, and all the little wind¬ 
flowers folded up for the night, I still wandered 
in the green paths, my heart full of happiest 
gratitude. It makes one very humble to see one¬ 
self surrounded by such a wealth of beauty and 
perfection anonymously lavished, and to think 
of the infinite meanness of our own grudging 
charities, and how displeased we are if they are 


HER GERMAN GARDEN 


225 


not promptly and properly appreciated. I do 
sincerely trust that the benediction that is always 
awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be more 
deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and 
patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy 
flowers I so much love. 








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■j. •*. 







THE SOLITARY SUMMER 


BY THE AUTHOR OF 

^Elizabeth and her German Garden^ 


Cloth. i2mo. $1.50 


“ A continuation of that delightful chronicle of days 
spent in and about one of the most delightful gardens 
known to modern literature. The author’s exquisite 
humor is ever present, and her descriptions . . . have 
a wonderful freshness and charm.” — Evening Post. 

Perhaps even more charming than the fascinating 
original, which is saying a great deal .”—Glasgow Herald. 

One of the most charming books that has been pub¬ 
lished for many a month.” — San Francisco Chronicle. 

“ It is incited by a garden and very happily inspired. 
The best praise we can give it — and it is really very 
high praise — is to call it a sequel to ' Elizabeth,’ which 
has all the charm of its predecessor and none of the 
common faults of a sequel .”—The Times (London). 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, HEW YORK 






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